g accusations, whether the whole proceedings were not
carried on by the agency of the devil. Might not the great enemy have put
false testimony into the mouths of the witnesses, or might not the
witnesses be witches themselves? Every man who was in danger of losing his
wife, his child, or his sister, embraced this doctrine with avidity. The
revulsion was as sudden as the first frenzy. All at once, the colonists
were convinced of their error. The judges put a stop to the prosecutions,
even of those who had confessed their guilt. The latter were no sooner at
liberty than they retracted all they had said, and the greater number
hardly remembered the avowals which agony had extorted from them. Eight
persons, who had been tried and condemned, were set free; and gradually
girls ceased to have fits and to talk of the persecutions of the devil.
The judge who had condemned the first criminal executed on this charge,
was so smitten with sorrow and humiliation at his folly, that he set apart
the anniversary of that day as one of solemn penitence and fasting. He
still clung to the belief in witchcraft; no new light had broken in upon
him on that subject, but, happily for the community, the delusion had
taken a merciful turn. The whole colony shared the feeling; the jurors on
the different trials openly expressed their penitence in the churches; and
those who had suffered were regarded as the victims, and not as the
accomplices of Satan.

It is related that the Indian tribes in New England were sorely puzzled at
the infatuation of the settlers, and thought them either a race inferior
to, or more sinful than the French colonists in the vicinity, amongst
whom, as they remarked, "the Great Spirit sent no witches."

Returning again to the continent of Europe, we find that, after the year
1680, men became still wiser upon this subject. For twenty years the
populace were left to their belief, but governments in general gave it no
aliment in the shape of executions. The edict of Louis XIV. gave a blow to
the superstition, from which it never recovered. The last execution in the
Protestant cantons of Switzerland was at Geneva, in 1652. The various
potentates of Germany, although they could not stay the trials, invariably
commuted the sentence into imprisonment, in all cases where the pretended
witch was accused of pure witchcraft, unconnected with any other crime. In
the year 1701, Thomasius, the learned professor at the University of
Halle