"When I came in, past 7 at night, my wife met me in the Entry and told me Betty had surprised them. I was surprised with the Abruptness of the Relation. It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little while after dinner she burst into an amazing cry which caus'd all the family to cry too. Her Mother ask'd the Reason, she gave none; at last said she was afraid she should go to Hell, her Sins were not pardon'd. She was first wounded by my reading a sermon of Mr. Norton's; Text, Ye shall seek me and shall not find me. And these words in the Sermon, Ye shall seek me and die in your Sins, ran in her Mind and terrified her greatly. And staying at home, she read out of Mr. Cotton Mather--Why hath Satan filled thy Heart? which increas'd her Fear. Her Mother asked her whether she pray'd. She answered Yes, but fear'd her prayers were not heard, because her sins were not pardoned." Poor little wounded Betty! her fear that she should go to hell because she, like Spira, was not elected, was answered by her father who, having led her into this sad state, was but ill-fitted to comfort her. Both prayed with bitter tears, and he says mournfully, "I hope God heard us." Hell, Satan, eternal damnation, everlasting torments, were ever held up before these Puritan children. We could truthfully paraphrase Wordsworth's beautiful line "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," and say of these Boston children, "Hell lay about them in their infancy." The lists in their books of the proper names in the Bible had an accompanying list--that of names of the devil. A most painfully explicit account of one of the ultra-sensitive natures developed by these methods is given by Cotton Mather in his most offensive style in a short religious biography of Nathaniel Mather. The boy died when he was nineteen years old, but unhappily he kept a diary of his religious sentiments and fears. He fasted often and prayed constantly even in his sleep. He wrote out in detail his covenant with God, and I cannot doubt that he more than lived up to his promises, as he did to the minute rules he laid out for his various religious duties. Still this young Christian was full of self-loathing, horrible conceptions of God, unbounded dread of death, and all the horrors of a morbid soul. A letter written by an older Mather (about 1638), when he was twelve years old, shows an ancestral tendency to religious fears:--