hape, to terrify and tempt. Special
providences and unusual phenomena, like earthquakes, mirages, and the
northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others
as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson,
the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor,
been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open
assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it
might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There
will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a
little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will
be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief
culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that
"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a
few children who {341} accused certain uncanny old women and other
persons of mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them
with magic, gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest
character, and resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people.
Many of the possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition
of a little black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red
book which he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn
God's service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present
at meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read
without contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned
divines considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of
unblemished lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was
general at that time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic
cases of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and
Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his
belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of
atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and
executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of
intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be
well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what
things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two
hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts
Puritans of {342} the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held
no beau