Sewall, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials, stood in Boston's South Church in 1697 while his bowed-head confession was read aloud, publicly accepting 'blame and shame' for the executions and asking God's pardon. He continued privately marking an annual day of fasting and repentance for this verdict for the rest of his life.
The diarist interprets ordinary occurrences, deaths, weather, illness, chance meetings, as legible signs of divine judgment or mercy, treating the mundane record as evidence of God's active hand. The accounting of a life becomes a running theological audit rather than a neutral log of facts.
The same diary that catalogues frequent child and spouse deaths with careful attention to funerals, scarves, and burials also records, in old age, the pragmatic negotiation of remarriage down to gloves, raisins, and dowry terms. The book shows mourning and practical self-interest recorded side by side without the author treating them as contradictory.
Writing the self down daily functions as a moral discipline: the habit of recording conduct, scruples, and failings turns the act of keeping a record into a mechanism for monitoring and correcting one's own behavior. The ledger is kept partly so the keeper can be held to account by it.