CHAPTER XII

RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND TRAINING

Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seven

teenth, the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. Sermons, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb.

The Fast Day In long rows of dumpy little quartos they indeed stand here bodily before us; by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of memory itself; it is grown what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts, sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities.

T

· Oliver Cromwell's Life and Letters. Thomas Carlyle, 1845.

the

HE religious aspect of the life of children, especially in early colonial days, and most particularly in New England, bore a far deeper relation to the round of daily life than can be accorded to it in these pages. The spirit of the Lord, perhaps I should say the fear of the Lord, truly filled their days. Born into a religious atmossphere, reared in religious ways, surrounded on every side by religious influences, they could not escape

the impress of deep religious feeling; they certainly had a profound familiarity with the Bible. The historian Green says that the Englishman of that day was a man of one book, and that book the Bible. It might with equal truth be said that the universal child's book of that day was the Bible. There were few American children until after the Revolution who had ever read from any book save the Bible, a primer, or catechism, and perhaps a hymn book or an almanac.

The usual method at that time of reading the Bible through was in the regular succession of every chapter from beginning to end, not leaving out even Leviticus and Numbers. This naturally detracted from the interest which would have been awakened by a wise selection of parts suited to the liking of children; and many portions doubtless frightened young children, as we have abundant record in the writings of Sewall and Mather. J. T. Buckingham stated in his Memoirs that he read the Bible through at least a dozen times before he was sixteen years old. Some portions, especially the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, filled him with unspeakable terror, and he called the enforced reading of them “a piece of gratuitous and unprofitable cruelty." He was careful, however, to pay due tribute to the influence of the Bible upon his literary composition and

phraseology.

phraseology. The constant reading of the beautiful English wording of the Bible influenced not only the style of writing of that day, but controlled the everyday speech of the people, keeping it pure and simple.

There was one important reason for the unfailing desire of English folk for the Bible and the employment of its words and terms; it was not only the sole book with which most English readers were familiar, the book which supplied to them sacred hymns and warlike songs, the great voices of the prophets, the parables of the Evangelists, stories of peril and adventure, logic, legends, history, visions, but it was also a new book. The family of the seventeenth century that read the words of the small Geneva Bibles in the home circle, or poorer folk who listened to the outdoor reading thereof, heard a voice that they had longed for and waited for and suffered for, and that their fathers had died for, and a treasure thus acquired is never lightly heeded. The Pilgrim Fathers left England for Holland before King James' Bible, our Authorized Version, had been published. The Puritans of the Boston and Salem settlements had seen the importation of Geneva Bibles forbidden in England by Laud in 1633, and the reading prohibited at their meetings. They revelled in it in their new homes, for custom

had