The
leaders of that emigration believed and taught that demons loved to dwell
in waste and wooded places, that the Indians did homage to the bodily
presence of the Devil, and that he was especially enraged against those
who had planted an outpost of the true faith upon this continent hitherto
all his own. In the third generation of the settlement, in proportion as
living faith decayed, the clergy insisted all the more strongly on the
traditions of the elders, and as they all placed the sources of goodness
and religion in some inaccessible Other World rather than in the soul of
man himself, they clung to every shred of the supernatural as proof of
the existence of that Other World, and of its interest in the affairs of
this. They had the countenance of all the great theologians, Catholic as
well as Protestant, of the leaders of the Reformation, and in their own
day of such men as More and Glanvil and Baxter.[114] If to all these
causes, more or less operative in 1692, we add the harassing excitement
of an Indian war (urged on by Satan in his hatred of the churches), with
its daily and nightly apprehensions and alarms, we shall be less
astonished that the delusion in Salem Village rose so high than that it
subsided so soon.
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