The lithograph on the opposite page will, no doubt, make most of our readers smile; so will the other moral illustrations on the following pages. They make amusing decorations for the den or bar, interesting to study out for their wealth of detail. But how could hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, so many of them our own forebears, have taken such things so literally and seriously? This question, of course, is one measure of the gulf that separates the generations, a gulf that has to do with faith and feeling, a gulf that the historian, with all his documents and quotations, can never fully bridge. We know what happened—that Calvinistic Puritanism, which had lost much of its force in the rationalist era of the American Revolution, underwent a revival in the nineteenth century, and that the Devil never had a rougher ride. We have the sermons, some of them; we can read the accounts of camp meetings, with their barkings, jerkings, weepings, and shoutings. We can see the converts, just like a pack of dogs after an opossum, rushing to “tree the devil,” but it is very hard, under this quasi comedy, to see how they felt inside. There is a glimpse of it here and there, however. In Freedom’s Ferment , Alice Felt Tyler describes an occasion at Andover, Massachusetts, when the principal of Phillips Academy dismissed classes, announcing: “There will now be a prayer meeting; those who wish to lie down in everlasting burning may go, the rest will stay.” Only two departed, and the rest heard a sermon on this text: “And ye shall see them sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven and ye yourselves cast out.” Then one lad went to his room to meditate in his diary about the horror of watching one’s happy former companions in Heaven while one was oneself in Hell. “The punishment and tortures of condemned spirits will be increasing to all eternity,” he wrote. “How tremendous and overwhelming is the thought that the suffering of one soul will be greater than the united suffering of all in the universe for millions of ages!” A brush with Andover in those pre-Ivy League days, a few hours hearing out an angry New England sermon, an exposure to the revivalist who began his performance with the invocation, “Almighty and diabolical God”—and who would not be ready to buy from the lithograph seller? Hell was very real and very hot, and Old Scratch never more artful in his stratagems. No clouds of casuistry about “social” or “anti-social” behavior obscured the issues for plain people. Good was good, and evil, evil, and there was no laughter when Father (bought the lithograph and nailed it on the wall.