She admits that she suffers from internal conflicts regarding her religious beliefs several times in "To My Dear Children", even explicitly stating "I have argued thus with myself- even” (Bradstreet 164). Her struggle to know what to believe was so great that she almost abandoned her original goal of writing to her children. This letter begins by addressing her children directly, but after the first paragraph, she no longer writes in the second person, with one exception, until the conclusion. Bradstreet instead writes the entire middle section about the problems she faced during her life regarding her religion and how she overcame these problems. It also gives a great perspective on the mindset of all of its Massachusetts neighbors. The “city on a hill” (Winthrop 149) that John Winthrop told the Puritans they could create was not a perfect utopia, even if they were finally freed from the oppression of the Catholic Church. Doubts about whether God was truly on their side ensued when the Puritans discovered how painful it was to live on the land and far from the luxuries they were accustomed to in Europe. They began to question their own beliefs, just like Anne Bradstreet. She presents these doubts in her letter and explains why this society was not the perfect society it was supposed to be. She also defends all her doubts with