Corser relented, she went on to tell, and this second obstacle was successfully vanquished, too. There is more than meets the eye in such a victory. “ ’Tis a tyranny,” wrote old Cotton Mather, “to impose upon every man a record of the precise time and way of their conversion to God. Few that have been restrained by a religious education can give such an one.”⁶⁵ The theory behind the requirement was that by nature one was wholly alienated from God, naturally and entirely wicked, and that the first movement of divine grace upon one’s soul must therefore have been apparent as something completely distinct from ordinary experience. But if a person had been conscious of divine grace in his daily life as far back as he could remember, it might well be difficult or impossible to settle on any one spiritual experience as decisive. In standing out against this requirement, Mary Baker was in effect standing out against the doctrine of natural and total depravity.

Yet her rebellion at this time was only partial. She was orthodox enough when she wrote in “Shade and Sunshine”:

The moral power to will in Adam died
Till mercy whispered from her blest abode
Who died in Adam lives through Christ in God.⁶⁶

When a person writes about the natural depravity of human nature it is not always possible to tell whether he is writing merely out of low spirits and unhappy circumstances or out of some more basic insight into the mortal state. The former is illustrated in [entries] made by  ● ● ●