This chapter explores changes in theological teaching about temporality and the eternal afterlife in three significant hymnbooks for children published during the long eighteenth century: Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715), Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), and Ann and Jane Taylor’s Hymns for Infant Minds (1809). While the first collection used the threat of hell as the primary means of persuading children to live morally upright, productive lives in continuum with earlier Puritan writings for children, subsequent writers revised this pattern by offering consolation about death and the afterlife by presenting heaven as an ideal place where family bonds and friendships might resume in an ideal version of earthly community, and stressing God’s benevolence. The essay suggests that, as accessible texts encountered ubiquitously throughout childhood at church or chapel, in the schoolroom and in the home, which were habitually read, sung, memorised and recited, children’s hymns not only provided memorable pedagogic vehicles, but allowed for familiar ritual performance to help navigate the gradually unfolding cycle of life.