17Ibid., 162; Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 57-77; Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 1630-1783 (New York, 1952), 180; Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England (New York, 1891), 246. Here again, there are two countervailing myths about New England: the myth of the spurious Connecticut “Blue Laws” which allegedly forbade men to shave and women to kiss their children on the sabbath. These statutes were invented by Samuel Peters, an Anglian clergyman and High Tory who fled New England in the Revolution and wrote a General History of Connecticut (London, 1781). Travelers’ accounts added other apocrypha. But partisans of the Puritans have created a countermyth in correcting these errors. The sabbath laws of New England were very rigorous, and prosecutions by church and state were sometimes extreme.

18 Charles Francis Adams, “Some Phases of Sexual Morality and Church Discipline in Puritan New England,” MAHSP, 2nd series 6 (1891), 495.

19 Major Puritan works on the Sabbath include Thomas Shepard, Theses Sabbaticae: Or, The Doctrine of the Sabbath (London, 1649); William Pynchon, A Treatise on the Sabbath … Whereto Is Annexed a Treatise of Holy Time (London, 1655).