The omission of these paragraphs renders the
document, as given by Mather, an absolute misrepresentation of the
transaction, and places Phips in the attitude of having disregarded the
advice of the Ministers, in suffering the trials to proceed as they did;
throwing upon his memory a load of infamy, outweighing all the florid
and extravagant eulogies showered upon him, in the _Life_: verifying and
fulfilling the apprehensions he expressed in his letter of the
fourteenth of October, 1692: "I know my enemies are seeking to turn it
all upon me."

The Reviewer says that "Mr. Mather did not profess to quote the whole
_Advice_, but simply made extracts from it." He professed to give what
the Ministers "declared." I submit to every honorable mind, whether what
Mather printed, omitting the _first_, _second_ and _eighth_ Sections,
was a fair statement of what the Ministers "declared."

The paragraphs he selected, appear, on their face, to urge caution and
even delay, in the proceedings. They leave this impression on the
general reader, and have been so regarded from that day to this. The
artifice, by which the responsibility for what followed was shifted,
from the Ministers, upon Phips and the Court, has, in a great measure,
succeeded. I trust that I have shown that the clauses and words that
seem to indicate caution, had very little force, in that direction; but
that, when the disguising veil of an artful phraseology is removed, they
give substantial countenance to the proceedings of the Court,
throughout.

I desire, at this point, to ask the further attention of the reader to
Mather's manner of referring to the _Advice of the Ministers_. In his
_Wonders_, he quotes the _eighth_ and _second_ Articles of it (_Pages
12, 55_), in one instance, ascribing the _Advice_ to "Reverend persons,"
"men of God," "gracious men," and, in the other, characterizing it as
"gracious words." He also, in the same work, quotes the _sixth_ Article,
_omitting the words I have placed in brackets, without any indication of
an omission_. Writing, in 1692, when the delusion was at its height, and
for the purpose of keeping the public mind up to the work of the
prosecutions, he gloried chiefly in the _first_, _second_, and _eighth_
Articles, and brought them alone forward, in full. The others he passed
over, with the exception of the _sixth_, from which he struck out the
central sentence--that having the appearance of endorsing the views of
those opposed