These ministers lived at a time when New England Puritanism in its extreme type was coming to a close; but parents and households thus reared clung more rigidly and exactly to it and instilled in it a fervent hope of giving permanency to what seemed to their sad eyes in danger of being wholly thrust aside and lost. Such religionists were both Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall, "true New-English Christians" they called and deemed themselves. They were very gentle with their children; but a profound anxiety for the welfare of those young souls made them most cruel in the intensity of their teaching and warning; especially displeasing to modern modes of thought are their constant reminders of death. When Cotton Mather's little daughter was but four years old he made this entry in his diary:-- "I took my little daughter Katy into my Study and then I told my child I am to dye Shortly and shee must, when I am Dead, remember Everything I now said unto her. I sett before her the sinful Condition of her Nature, and I charged her to pray in Secret Places every Day. That God for the sake of Jesus Christ would give her a New Heart. I gave her to understand that when I am taken from her she must look to meet with more humbling Afflictions than she does now she has a Tender Father to provide for her." The vanity of all such painful instruction, harrowing to the father and terrifying to the child, is shown in the sequel. Cotton Mather did not die till thirty years afterward, and long survived the tender little blossom that he loved yet blighted with the chill and dread of death. The pages of Judge Sewall's diary sadly prove his performance of what he believed to be his duty to his children, just as the entries show the bewilderment and terror of his children under his teachings. Elizabeth Sewall was the most timid and fearful of them all; a frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, "God has delivered her now from all her fears." The process which developed this unhappy nature is plainly shown by many entries in the diary. This was when she was about five years old:-- "It falls to my daughter Elizabeth's Share to read the 24 of Isaiah which she doth with many Tears not being very well and the Contents of the Chapter and Sympathy with her draw Tears from me also." The terrible verses telling of God's judgment on the land, of fear, of the pit, of the snare, of emptiness and waste, of destruction and desolation, must have sunk deep into the heart of the sick child, and produced the condition shown by this entry when she was a few years older:--