It is, then, not astonishing that our forefathers in New England should have been victims to a common delusion of their times. We may even say that the circumstances of their lives were such as to render them especially liable to it; for though the hardships of the early history of the settlement grew less as time went on, the life in New England was, at the best, lonely and depressing. The colonists lived dreary lives of laborious and uninteresting toil, with few physical comforts, and with poor and unvaried diet. They had few amusements, little or no recreation, and they were constantly in face of difficulties, constantly exposed to danger. Their houses were on the verge of the mysterious forest, where strange sights and sounds were to be seen and heard, where dwelt the Indians, often hostile and always a source of uneasiness. They had few books, and those they had were not of a character to draw them away from the contemplation of themselves. The Bible they had, it is true, but to read it for any purpose except that of spiritual exercise would have been deemed profane. Sermons of abnormal length and dryness, controversial treatises, ponderous alike literally and figuratively, and, as we shall see later, ghastly and blood-curdling accounts of memorable providences, formed their principal literature. The settlers had been for the most part emigrants from quiet country towns and villages in England, put down in the unknown wilderness, to work out, under the pressure of religious enthusiasm, a new social and religious polity. The life was small, narrow, and squalid, only redeemed from utter sordidness by gleams of religious idealism and by the stern resolution of the better class of the settlers to keep themselves and their neighbors in the paths of righteousness. Their religion was a sombre Calvinism, giving more prominence to the terrors of the law than to the comforts of the gospel. Living as they did in scriptural thought, speaking in scriptural phraseology, dwelling constantly upon the similarity of their position with that of the children of Israel, it is not surprising that they should have carried their intense literalism into every particular. Their external relations, their religious and political systems, were ruled by the law of Moses as they imagined it from their somewhat uncritical study of the Old Testament. Their Christianity was profoundly internal and introspective, something which was between each individual soul and the Almighty, rather than a law of social life. The result of this was twofold. They were led to ascribe to their own convictions the character of divine revelations, and were also rendered intensely morbid, sometimes exalted above measure and sometimes as irrationally despondent. They felt that they were the chosen people of the Lord, doing a great work for him, in “setting up the candlestick of a pure church in the wilderness to which the like-minded might resort”; and this feeling led them to believe that