the case of Martha
Carrier. The Magistrates who sat and listened, with wondering awe, to
such evidence from a little child against her mother, in the presence of
that mother, must have been bereft, by the baleful superstitions of the
hour, of all natural sensibility. They countenanced a violation of
reason, common sense, and the instincts of humanity, too horrible to be
thought of.

The unhappy mother felt it in the deep recesses of her strong nature.
That trait, in the female and maternal heart, which, when developed,
assumes a heroic aspect, was brought out in terrific power. She looked
to the Magistrates, after the accusing girls had charged her with having
"killed thirteen at Andover," with a stern bravery to which those
dignitaries had not been accustomed, and rebuked them: "It is a shameful
thing, that you should mind those folks that are out of their wits;" and
then, turning to the accusers, said, "You lie, and I am wronged." This
woman, like all the rest, met her fate with a demeanor that left no room
for malice to utter a word of disparagement, protesting her innocence.
Mather witnessed her execution; and in a memorandum to the report,
written in the professed character of an historian, having great
compassion for "surviving relatives," calls her a "rampant hag."

Bringing young children to swear away the life of their mother, was
probably felt by the Judges to be too great a shock upon natural
sensibilities to be risked again, and they were not produced at the
trial; but Mather, notwithstanding, had no reluctance to publish the
substance of their testimony, as what they would have sworn to if
called upon; and says they were not put upon the stand, because there
was evidence "enough" without them.

Such were the reports of those of the trials, which had then taken
place, selected by Mather to be put into the _Wonders of the Invisible
World_, and thus to be "boxed about,"--to adopt the Reviewer's
interpretation--to strike down the "Spectre of Sadduceeism," that is, to
extirpate and bring to an end all doubts about witchcraft and all
attempts to stop the prosecutions.

This book was written while the proceedings at Salem were at their
height, during the very month in which sixteen persons had been
sentenced to death and eight executed, evidently, from its whole tenor,
and as the Reviewer admits, for the purpose of silencing objectors and
doubters, Sadducees and Witch-advocates, before the meeting of the
Cour