Womans Life in Colonial Days | Page 8

of the day that we discover a still more unbending, harsh,
and hideous view of the Creator and his characteristics. In the
thunderings of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, we, like the
colonial women who sat so meekly in the high, hard benches, may
fairly smell the brimstone of the Nether World. Why, exclaims
Jonathan Edwards in his sermon, _The Eternity of Hell Torments_:
"Do but consider what it is to suffer extreme torment forever and ever;
to suffer it day and night, from one day to another, from one year to
another, from one age to another, from one thousand ages to another,
and so, adding age to age, and thousands to thousands, in pain, in
wailing and lamenting, groaning and shrieking, and gnashing your teeth;
with your souls full of dreadful grief and amazement, with your bodies
and every member full of racking torture, without any possibility of
getting ease; without any possibility of moving God to pity by your
cries; without any possibility of hiding yourselves from him.... How
dismal will it be, when you are under these racking torments, to know
assuredly that you never, never shall be delivered from them; to have
no hope; when you shall wish that you might but be turned into nothing,
but shall have no hope of it; when you shall wish that you might be
turned into a toad or a serpent, but shall have no hope of it; when you
would rejoice, if you might but have any relief, after you shall have
endured these torments millions of ages, but shall have no hope of it;
when after you shall have worn out the age of the sun, moon, and stars,
in your dolorous groans and lamentations, without any rest day or night,
when after you shall have worn out a thousand more such ages, yet you
shall have no hope, but shall know that you are not one whit nearer to
the end of your torments; but that still there are the same groans, the
same shrieks, the same doleful cries, incessantly to be made by you,
and that the smoke of your torment shall still ascend up, forever and
ever; and that your souls, which shall have been agitated with the wrath
of God all this while, yet will still exist to bear more wrath; your bodies,
which shall have been burning and roasting all this while in these

glowing flames, yet shall not have been consumed, but will remain to
roast through an eternity yet, which will not have been at all shortened
by what shall have been past."
When we remember that to the Puritan man, woman, or child the
message of the preacher meant the message of God, we may imagine
what effect such words had on a colonial congregation. To the
overwrought nerves of many a Puritan woman, taught to believe
meekly the doctrines of her father, and weakened in body by ceaseless
childbearing and unending toil, such a picture must indeed have been
terrifying. And the God that she and her husband heard described
Sabbath after Sabbath was not only heartily willing to condemn man to
eternal torment but capable of enjoying the tortures of the damned, and
gloating in strange joy over the writhings of the condemned. Is it any
wonder that in the midst of Jonathan Edward's sermon, Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God, men and women sprang to their feet and
shrieked in anguish, "What shall we do to be saved?"
"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider,
or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully
provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as
worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes
than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as
abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in
ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel
did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from
falling into the fire every moment; it is ascribed to nothing else that you
did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in
this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other
reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose
in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up; there is no other
reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat
here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful
wicked manner of