would have been unendurable.

As it was, Mather exposed himself to much odium, because it was
understood that he was practising, on his own responsibility and
privately, upon the plan he wished the Judges to adopt, as a principle
and method of procedure, in all the trials. He says: "It may be, no man
living ever had more people, under preternatural and astonishing
circumstances, cast by the providence of God into his more particular
care than I have had."

Of course, those persons would be most obnoxious to ill-feeling in the
community, who were known, as he says of himself, in the foregoing
sentence, to have most intimacy with, and influence over, the accusers.
For this reason, Cotton Mather was the special object of resentment. No
wonder that he sometimes bewails, and sometimes berates, the storm of
angry passions raging around. A very bitter feeling pervaded the
country, grounded on the conviction that there was "a respect to
persons," and a connivance, in behalf of some, by those managing the
affair. The public was shocked by having such persons as the Rev. Samuel
Willard, Mrs. Hale of Beverly, and the Lady of the Governor, cried out
upon by the "afflicted children;" and the commotion was heightened by a
cross-current of indignant enquiries: "Why, as these persons are
accused, are they not arrested and imprisoned?"

Mather alludes, in frequent passages, to this angry state of feeling, as
the following: "It is by our quarrels that we spoil our prayers; and if
our humble, zealous, and united prayers are once hindered! Alas, the
Philistines of Hell have cut our locks for us; they will then blind us,
mock us, ruin us. In truth, I cannot altogether blame it, if people are
a little transported, when they conceive all the secular interests of
themselves and their families at stake, and yet, at the sight of these
heart-burnings, I cannot forbear the exclamation of the sweet-spirited
Austin, in his pacificatory epistle to Jerom, on the contest with
Ruffin, '_O misera et miseranda conditio!_'"--_Wonders_, 11.

There was another evil to which he exposed himself by seeking to have
such frequent, private, and confidential intercourse with the afflicted
accusers and confessing witches, who professed to have so often seen,
associated with, and suffered from, spectral images of the Devil's
confederates; which spectral shapes, as was believed, were, after all,
the Devil himself. He came under the imputation of what, in Scripture