Puritan Self-fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward

14 June 1595 . My negligence is not calling upon God before I went to the chapel, and the little desire I had there to call on God, and my drowsiness in God's service. My sins even through the whole day, being Sunday: (1) my negligence aforesaid, (2) my hearing of the sermon without that sense which I should have had, (2) [ sic ] in not praying God to bless it to me afterward, (3) in not talking of good things at dinner being the posteriorums day, (4) in the immoderate use of God's creatures, (5) in sleeping immediately after dinner, (6) in not preparing me to sermon til it tolled, (7) in sluggish hearing of God's word, and that for my great dinner, (8) in hearing another sermon sluggishly, (9) in returning home and omitting our repetition of sermons, by reason that my countryman Eubank was with me, (11) [ sic ] in not exhorting him to any good thing, (12) in not going to evening prayers, (13) in supping liberally, never remembering our poor brethren, (14) in not taking order to give the poor women somewhat at 7 o'clock, (15) my dulness in stirring of my brother to Christian meditations, (16) my want of affections in hearing the sermons repeated, (17), my sluggishness in prayer, and thus sin I daily against thee, O Lord. On such diary entries as this one of Samuel Ward's, historians have built an edifice called “puritanism.” It is rigid, narrow, and quaintly absurd in design. It is the sort of structure on which twentieth-century people can look down with complacency from the heights of their own intellectual towers. It makes one glad to have escaped the confining corridors of faith and piety by rendering them dark, small, and rather shabby.