1712 BENJAMIN WADSWORTH. The Well-Ordered Family. Rare Early American Puritan!

Very rare title by Benjamin Wadsworth [1670-1737], an influential Colonial era American Puritan who pastored concurrently and was friends with Cotton Mather.  Edmund S. Morgan, one of the most important American Puritan scholars, notes the present work as one of the most influential and signficant documents articulating the puritan ethic of home and family in its original theological and devotional context.  Probably not as a coincidence, the same year the present work was published, Wadsworth declared that anyone who either participated in, directly or indirectly, abortion was guilty of murder. This appears to have been the first public articulation of abortion as equivalent with murder in the United States.  The present work includes chapters on on the primary nature of the family as church and the need for family devotion, on the privileges and duties of husbands and wives, on children, and a contextually-fascinating chapter on the treatment of servants [i.e. slaves]. The section on