Intimations of Mortality: the Puritan and Evangelical Message to Children

Abstract

The juvenile book trade in England might be said to have begun with seventeenth-century Protestant concern to rescue children from hell. Up to the 1670s there had been no separate provision for juvenile readers, they had used the same theological texts as their elders. Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted (1672), for instance, was a classic which few young Puritans could have escaped, and under its later title A Sure Guide to Heaven it was to remain a staple of the stricter sort of Evangelical upbringing until the nineteenth century. Like other preachers trying to rouse the unconverted, Alleine rose to his greatest heights of eloquence when he described the sufferings to be expected by the unregenerate.

Oh, look down into the bottomless Pit: Seest thou how the Smoak of their Torment acendeth for ever and ever? How black are the Fiends? How furious are their Tormentors? ‘Tis their only Musick to hear how their miserable Patients roar, to hear their Bones crack: ‘Tis their Meat and Drink, to see how their Flesh frieth, and their Fat droppeth; to drench them with burning Metal, and to rip open their Bodies, and to pour in the fierce burning Brass into their Bowels, and the recesses and ventricles of their Hearts.