Womans Life in Colonial Days | Page 6

the
trials of womanhood in the days of the nation's childhood. To
understand in any measure at all the life of a child or a wife or a mother
of the Puritan colonies with its strain and suffering, we must know and
comprehend her religion. Let us examine this--the dominating
influence of her life.
_II. Woman and Her Religion_
Paradoxical as it may seem, religion was to the colonial woman both a
blessing and a curse. Though it gave courage and some comfort it was
as hard and unyielding as steel. We of this later hour may well shudder
when we read the sermons of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards;
but if the mere reading causes astonishment after the lapse of these
hundreds of years, what terror the messages must have inspired in those
who lived under their terrific indictments, prophecies, and warnings.
Here was a religion based on Judaism and the Mosaic code, "an eye for
an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." Moses Coit Tyler has declared in his
_History of American Literature_:[2] "They did not attempt to combine

the sacred and the secular; they simply abolished the secular and left
only the sacred. The state became the church; the king a priest; politics
a department of theology; citizenship the privilege of those only who
had received baptism and the Lord's Supper."
And what an idea of the sacred was theirs! The gentleness, the mercy,
the loving kindness that are of God so seldom enter into those ancient
discussions that such attributes are almost negligible. Michael
Wigglesworth's poem, The Day of Doom, published in 1662, may be
considered as an authoritative treatise on the theology of the Puritans;
for it not only was so popular as to receive several reprints, but was
sanctioned by the elders of the church themselves. If this was
orthodoxy--and the proof that it was is evident--it was of a sort that
might well sour and embitter the nature of man and fill the gentle soul
of womanhood with fear and dark forebodings. We well know that the
Puritans thoroughly believed that man's nature was weak and sinful,
and that the human soul was a prisoner placed here upon earth by the
Creator to be surrounded with temptations. This God is good, however,
in that he has given man an opportunity to overcome the surrounding
evils.
"But I'm a prisoner, Under a heavy chain; Almighty God's afflicting
hand, Doth me by force restrain.
* * * * *
"But why should I complain That have so good a God, That doth mine
heart with comfort fill Ev'n whilst I feel his rod?
* * * * *
"Let God be magnified, Whose everlasting strength Upholds me under
sufferings Of more than ten years' length."
The Day of Doom is, in the main, its author's vision of judgment day,
and, whatever artistic or theological defects it may have, it undeniably
possesses realism. For instance, several stanzas deal with one of the
most dreadful doctrines of the Puritan faith, that all infants who died

unbaptized entered into eternal torment--a theory that must have
influenced profoundly the happiness and woe of colonial women. The
poem describes for us what was then believed should be the scene on
that final day when young and old, heathen and Christian, saint and
sinner, are called before their God to answer for their conduct in the
flesh. Hear the plea of the infants, who dying, at birth before baptism
could be administered, asked to be relieved from punishment on the
grounds that they have committed no sin.
"If for our own transgression, or disobedience, We here did stand at thy
left hand, just were the Recompense; But Adam's guilt our souls hath
spilt, his fault is charg'd upon us; And that alone hath overthrown and
utterly undone us."
Pointing out that it was Adam who ate of the tree and that they were
innocent, they ask:
"O great Creator, why was our nature depraved and forlorn? Why so
defil'd, and made so vil'd, whilst we were yet unborn? If it be just, and
needs we must transgressors reckon'd be, Thy mercy, Lord, to us afford,
which sinners hath set free."
But the Creator answers:
"God doth such doom forbid, That men should die eternally for what
they never did. But what you call old Adam's fall, and only his trespass,
You call amiss to call it his, both his and yours it was."
The Judge then inquires why, since they would have received the
pleasures and joys which Adam could have given them, the rewards
and blessings, should they hesitate to share his "treason."
"Since then to share in his welfare, you could have been content, You
may with reason share in his treason, and in the punishment, Hence you
were born