Seventeenth-century readers, however, familiar with Puritan theology and the tricks, tropes, and conceits of metaphysical poetry could read her poem as a rhetorical argument intended to persuade them of her position on the schism that had threatened to tear apart the colony at Hutchinson’s trial. Bradstreet’s poem speaks obliquely to the competing beliefs on how to conduct one’s life on earth given the contradictory nature of Puritanism: even though God had predetermined, or elected, those who would attain salvation, one still had to conduct one’s life on earth so as to prepare to receive grace, or salvation, in the hereafter. The early American historian Edmund Morgan coined the term “the Puritan dilemma” to describe this conundrum: