Detailed Descriptions of Experience by Puritan Americans

In a nonher poem, Bradstreet goes level off further into the mystery of faith when she sees the burning of her house as an expression of God's unfathomable will:

I blest His progress to that gave and took,

That laid my goods now in the dust,

Far be it that I should repine (Bradstreet 100).

In these lines, Bradstreet is essentially saying that everything that happens, strike down to the smallest detail, down to the ashen heap of her burned belongings, is evidence of God's will in the world and in her life. The will of God to Bradstreet as a Puritan believer is just, and, therefore, that which exists is both the will of God and is just by definition, even though human beings can scarcely understand such a supernatural fact in rational terms: "so it was, and so 'twas just."

Again, as she proverb the love of her marriage as but a overshadow of the love they will experience in the Hereafter, in the nerve of her burned house, she is reminded that as wonderful as her home expertness have been in all the details she draws and remembers, it is but a pale reflection of the home which God has promised to the believers in nirvana:

Stands permanent, though this be fled (Bradstreet 100).

In any case, Rowlandson's judgments of the Indians are accompanied by a credit entry of the presence of God in her suffering. Her account is as practically about God's love for her as it is about her own suffering. This stands in contrast to Mather's piece which mentions Satan more than it mentions God.

---. "Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666." 99-100.

In Bradstreet, we take expressions of love--for husband, for God, for life on earth as swell up as eternal life in heaven--while in Mather we discern pious justification for doing precisely what Jesus warned against--judging others at the take chances of judging oneself.

My own wound also growing prankish . . .

yet so it must be, that I must impersonate all this cold winter night upon the cold bloodless ground, with my sick Child in my armes, looking that every min would be the last of its life, and having no Christian friend burn up me. . . . Oh, I may see the wonderfull power of God, that my Spirit did not utterly sink under my affliction: still the master copy upheld me with his gracious and mercifull Spirit, and we were both alive to see the light of the conterminous morning (Rowlandson 120).

Bradstreet, Anne. "To My Dear and Loving Husband." 97.

Cotton Mather's writing on witchery is meant to demonstrate that evil exists in human descriptor in the world but can be generate by paying attention to the details of the activities of witches, and by depending on the testimony of those believers whom the witch tries to entrap. In such a scenario, he himself (and others who seek to catch and punish witches) is doing the will of God. Whereas in Bradstreet, we find a sense of humility as the writer seeks to find God's will in her own life, at its best as well as its worst, in Mather we find the same seek leading to cruel judgment of others based on equivocal testimony.

--are used to judge in a way which is not based on the Bible, certainly not on anything in the New Testament which serves as the basis of Puritan belief.

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