replace a cow which a poor man had lost. She took great delight in 'private religious meetings,' and was specially edified by the sermons of Mr. Edwards, for whom she professed, as he records, with perhaps some pardonable complacency, the warmest affection. The grotesque side of the story of this detestable infant is, however, blended with something more shocking. The poor little wretch was tormented by the fear of hell-fire; and her relations and pastor appear to have done their best to stimulate this, as well as other religious sentiments. Edwards boasts at a subsequent period that 'hundreds of little children' had testified to the glory of God's work (iii. 146). He afterwards remarks incidentally that many people had considered as 'intolerable' the conduct of the ministers in 'frightening poor innocent little children with talk of hell-fire and eternal damnation' (iii. 200). And indeed we cannot deny that when reading some of the sermons to which poor Phebe Bartlet must have listened, and remembering the nature of the audience, the fingers of an unregenerate person clench themselves involuntarily as grasping an imaginary horsewhip. The answer given by Edwards does not diminish the impression. Innocent as children may seem to be, he replies, 'yet if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God's sight, but are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most miserable condition as well as grown persons; and they are naturally very senseless and stupid, being _born as the wild ass's colt_, and need much to awaken them' (iii. 200). Doubtless they got it, and if we will take Edwards' word for it, the awakening process never did harm in any one instance. Here we are touching the doctrines which naturally excite a fierce revolt of the conscience against the most repulsive of all theological dogmas, though unfortunately a revolt which is apt to generate an indiscriminating hostility.