The Mansion of Happiness Read Free

North Church,Cotton Mather, described it in an account of her trials and tribulations. She hid her sister and one of her children in the back of the house; eventually, she surrendered. She was then forced to walk, for weeks, over hundreds of miles, northward; she lived on nuts, bark, and wild onions. Once, she was allowed a piece of moose hide. She prayed “that the Lord would put an end unto her weary Life!” Six weeks into her captivity, she gave birth, “with none but the Snow under her, and the Heaven over her.” When the baby cried, the Indians “threw hot Embers in its Mouth,” which rendered its “Mouth so sore, that it could not Suck … So that it Starv’d and Dy’d.” She endured by faith alone. “She had her Mind often Irradiated with Strong Perswasions and Assurances, that she should yet
See the Goodness ofGod
, in this Land of the Living.” At last, “her tender and Loving Husband … found her out, and fetch’d her home, a Second time.” And what, upon her redemption, did she pray? “
O magnifie the LORD with me, and let us Exalt his Name together.
” The next time an Indian came to her door, she shot him. She lived to be ninety. 10
    In 1707, when Mather wrote about Bradley’s captivity and redemption, he used her story as an allegory for the Puritans’ errand into the wilderness, quotingVirgil: “
Ab una Disce omnes.
” From one, learn all. That same year, he delivered a sermon called “The Spirit of Life Entering into theSpiritually Dead,” preaching from the gospel of Luke: “He was Dead, and is Alive again.”Resurrection is redemption from the captivity of death, but Mather spoke, too, about another kind: redemption from the captivity of sin. Sinners are dead souls, dry bones, but they can be quickened, made alive. There wasn’t much you could do to be saved; the Lord would decide, on the Day of Judgment. You can hearken: “O ye Dry Bones, Hear the word of the Lord.” And you can pray: “
Lord, I am Dead! I am Dead! Oh! Let me ly no longer among the Dead.
” 11
    Hannah Bradley’s life was in God’s hands; her captivity was a blessing, her redemption a lesson. She was far from helpless, but she was pursuing neither happiness nor even happy old age. Hers was a story not of success or failure but of fate: God had chosen to visit her with affliction, and therewas nothing she could do but praise him, rememberingPsalms 119:50: “This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me.” Hannah Bradley didn’t think of life as a game. There was no game; there was only God, his word, and the quick and the dead.
    The first game called Life, in English, wasn’tMilton Bradley’s. It was the New Game of Human Life, a board game engraved and inked in 1790 byJohn Wallis, a London printer and mapmaker. Card and table games were fashionable in eighteenth-century London, which is where Hoyle’s books of rules were first published. Board games look like maps, and they were made by mapmakers. The first board game sold to children, Journey Through Europe, or the Play of Geography, was printed in London in 1759. The first jigsaw puzzle, Europe Divided into Its Kingdoms, also a map, was sold seven years later. Wallis’s New Game of Human Life is a map, too: its life is a journey along a twisty path from birth to death, with eighty-four stops on the road, one for each year. 12
    The notion of life as a voyage goes way back.Plato, in
The Republic
, wrote about old men as “travelers who have gone a journey.” 13 Francis Bacon, in his
History of Life and Death
, described life as a “pilgrimage through the wilderness of this world.” (It might be a long trip, Bacon warned, so be careful not to wear your shoes out: you might need them in the afterlife.) 14 In Wallis’s game, life is a voyage to salvation, just as it is inJohn Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, first printed in 1678. 15 (Either salvation or that other place: “I saw that there was a way to hell,” Bunyan