Ebook New-England Primer

Road to knowledge and to salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stem as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers, which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan Edwards said, young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewall's child, they were afraid they should goe to hell,' and were stirred up dreadfully to seek God. No earthly or heavenly rewards were offered to.