Puritanism had nothing whatever to
do with it. They acted under a delusion, which, with an exception here
and there (and those mainly medical men, like Wierus and Webster),
darkened the understanding of all Christendom. Dr. Henry More was no
Puritan; and his letter to Glanvil, prefixed to the third edition of the
"Sadducismus Triumphatus," was written in 1678, only fourteen years
before the trials at Salem. Bekker's "Bezauberte Welt" was published in
1693; and in the Preface he speaks of the difficulty of overcoming "the
prejudices in which not only ordinary men, but the learned also, are
obstinate." In Hathaway's case, 1702, Chief-Justice Holt, in charging the
jury, expresses no disbelief in the possibility of witchcraft, and the
indictment implies its existence. Indeed, the natural reaction from the
Salem mania of 1692 put an end to belief in devilish compacts and
demoniac possessions sooner in New England than elsewhere. The last we
hear of it there is in 1720, when Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford detected and
exposed an attempted cheat by two girls. Even in 1692, it was the foolish
breath of Cotton Mather and others of the clergy that blew the dying
embers of this ghastly superstition into a flame; and they were actuated
partly by a desire to bring about a religious revival, which might stay
for a while the hastening lapse of their own authority, and still more by
that credulous scepticism of feeble-minded piety which, dreads the
cutting away of an orthodox tumor of misbelief, as if the life-blood of
faith would follow, and would keep even a stumbling-block in the way of
salvation, if only enough generations had tripped over it to make it
venerable.
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