violent persecutors of those that did not profess their particular
creed. It was particularly due to the preaching of Cotton Mather that a
panic of fear was created through the New England Colonies. Mrs. Ann
Hibbons was tried before the Great and General Court of Massachusetts,
sentenced and hanged on the 19th of June, 1656. "Goody Oliver" was
executed as a witch on November 16th, 1688.

There were twenty murders in 1692, and these before a civil court. The
trials took place before the illegal Court of Oyer and Terminer,
appointed by Governor Phipps, at the instigation of the
Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice Stoughton, and Joseph Dudley,
formerly governor, and the Chief Judge of the Court which, in 1688, had
sent "Goody Oliver" to her death at the gallows.

Cotton Mather defended this practice in his book, "The Wonders of The
Invisible World," and Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, was equally
as strenuous in the "Witch Hunt." Increase Mather survived this massacre
thirty years, and his son, five years longer, but there is hardly a word
of regret or sympathy to be found anywhere, even in their private
diaries and correspondence. These executions in Massachusetts form one
of the darkest pages in the history of America.

It is not surprising that the clergy of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries supported both in practice and theory the Witchcraft Delusion,
but when we find the ablest minds of the laity bursting into print with
a vehement defense of this belief, it is difficult for us, in the
present day, to conceive of such folly. And yet, today, we have able
minds defending a precept of which the Witchcraft Delusion is but a
part.

"The defenders of the belief (Witchcraft), who were men of great and
distinguished talent, maintained that there was no fact in all history
more fully attested, and that to reject it would be to strike at the
root of all historical evidence of the miraculous." (_Lecky._)

The subject was examined in tens of thousands of cases, in almost every
country in Europe, by tribunals which included the acutest lawyers and
ecclesiastics of the ages, on the scene and at the time when the alleged
acts had taken place, and with the assistance of innumerable sworn
witnesses. The judges had no motive whatever to desire the condemnation
of the accused, and as conviction would be followed by fearful death,
they had the strongest motives to exercise their power with caution and
deliberation. T