almost every
sermon to ring in enough of it to keep up the agitation. In the course
of his discourse, he declared:

"The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were the
devil's territories, and it may easily be supposed that the devil is
exceedingly disturbed, when he perceives such people here, accomplishing
the promises of old, made unto our blessed Jesus, that he should have
the uttermost parts of the earth for his possessions. There was not a
greater uproar among the Ephesians, when the gospel was first brought
among them, than there is now among the powers of the air after whom
those Ephesians walked, when first the silver trumpets of the gospel
made the joyful sound in their dark domain. The devil, thus irritated,
hath tried all sorts of methods to overturn this poor plantation."

With this preface he assailed the unfortunate actor and his innocent
child as being tools of his Satanic majesty, and denounced those who
would lift the wounded, bleeding and beaten wayfarer from the road-side,
carry him home, or offer his unfortunate child a cup of cold water as
agents of darkness. Mr. Parris had forgotten some of the commands of the
divine Master, whom he professed to follow. He assailed "the little maid
furiously." That child of sorrow and of tears, whom he had never seen
before, and whose young heart ached from the wrongs heaped on her
innocent young head, was to him an object of demoniac fury.

She sat in the rear of the church, and, covering her face with her hands
as Mr. Parris assailed her father and herself, the tears silently
trickled through her small fingers. Goody Nurse, who sat near the child,
bent over and whispered some encouraging words in her ear.

"Verily, the Devil's own will be the Devil's own!" declared the pastor,
his eyes flashing with fury. "When one of Satan's imps hath been wounded
by a shaft of truth, shot from the bow of God, the angels of darkness,
verily, will hover over the suffering devil, and seek to undo what God
hath done." He called on those suffering from the familiar spirits to
behold one even now willing to soothe the offspring of a wicked player.

When Cora left the church that day, she asked Mrs. Stevens why Mr.
Parris hated her and said such hard things about her. "Surely I never
did him harm, and why doth he assail me so cruelly?"

Mrs. Stevens strove to comfort the wounded feelings of the child, by
assuring Cora that it was the mistaken zeal of the min