quaestions

Updated: May 2, 2025

I often fancy I should have enjoyed living in the good old times, but I am glad I never was a child in colonial New England to have been baptized in ice water, fed on brown bread and warm beer, to have had to learn the Assembly's Catechism and "explain all the Quaestions with conferring Texts," to have been constantly threatened with fear of death and terror of God, to have been forced to commit Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" to memory, and, after all, to have been whipped with a tattling stick.

Alice Morse Earle - Customs and Fashions in Old New England