"Nov. 6, 1692.--Joseph threw a knop of Brass and hit his Sister Betty on the forehead so as to make it bleed; and upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time and eating when Return Thanks, I whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in (call'd by his Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle; which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage." It was natural, too, that Judge Sewall's children should be timid; they ran in terror to their father's chamber at the approach of a thunderstorm; and, living in mysterious witchcraft days, they fled screaming through the hall, and their mother with them, at the sudden entrance of a neighbor with a rug over her head. All youthful Puritans were not as godly as the young Sewalls. Nathaniel Mather wrote thus in his diary: "When very young I went astray from God and my mind was altogether taken with vanities and follies: such as the remembrance of them doth greatly abase my soul within me. Of the manifold sins which then I was guilty of, none so sticks upon me as that, being very young, I was _whitling_ on the Sabbath-day; and for fear of being seen, I did it behind the _door_. A great _reproach_ of God! a specimen of that _atheism_ I brought into the world with me!" It is satisfactory to add that this young prig of a Mather died when nineteen years of age. Except in Jonathan Edwards's "Narratives of Surprising Conversions," no more painful examples of the Puritanical religious teaching of the young can be found than the account given in the _Magnalia_ of various young souls in whom the love of God was remarkably budding, especially this same unwholesome Nathaniel Mather. His diary redounded in dismal groans and self-abasement: he wrote out in detail his covenants with God. He laid out his minute rules and directions in his various religious duties. He lived in prayer thrice a day, and "did not slubber over his prayers with hasty amputations, but wrestled in them for a good part of an hour." He prayed in his sleep. He fasted. He made long lists of sins, long catalogues of things forbidden, "and then fell a-stoning them." He "chewed much on excellent sermons." He not only read the Bible, but "obliged himself to fetch a note and prayer out of each verse," as he read. In spite of all these preparations for a joyous hope and faith, he lived in the deepest despair; was full of blasphemous imaginations, horrible conceptions of God, was dejected, self-loathing, and wretched. Indeed, as Lowell said, soul-saving was to such a Christian the dreariest, not the cheerfullest of businesses.