now it not. At this
stage it was the bounden duty of the unfortunate being's church brethren
to help him by inducing him to confess the indwelling of an evil spirit
and thus free himself from the great impostor. And if he did not confess
then it were better that he be killed, lest the devil through him
contaminate all. Why, says Mather, in his _Wonders of the Invisible
World_: "If the devils now can strike the minds of men with any poisons
of so fine a composition and operation, that scores of innocent people
shall unite in confessions of a crime which we see actually committed,
it is a thing prodigious, beyond the wonders of the former ages, and it
threatens no less than a sort of dissolution upon the world."

To avoid or counteract this desolation was the purpose of the legal
proceedings at Salem. It was believed by fairly intelligent people that
Satan carried with him a black book in which he induced his victims to
write their names with their own blood, signifying thereby that they had
given their souls into his keeping, and were henceforth his liegemen.
The rendezvous of these lost and damned was deep in the forest; the time
of meeting, midnight. In such a place and at such an hour the assembly
of witches and wizards plotted against the saints of God, namely, the
Puritans. According to Cotton Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_,
at the trial of one of these martyrs to superstition, George Burroughs,
he was accused by eight of the confessing witches "as being the head
actor at some of their hellish rendezvouzes, and one who had the promise
of being a king in Satan's kingdom, now going to be erected. One of them
falling into a kind of trance affirmed that G.B. had carried her away
into a very high mountain, where he shewed her mighty and glorious
kingdoms, and said, 'he would give them all to her, if she would write
in his book.'"

In such an era, of course, the attempt was too often made to explain
events, not in the light of common reason but as visitations of God to
try the faith of the folk, or as devices of Satan to tempt them from the
narrow Path. Such an affliction as "nerves" was not readily
acknowledged, and anyone subject to fits or nervous disorders, or any
child irritable or tempestuous might easily be the victim of witchcraft.
Note what Increase Mather has to say on the matter when explaining the
case of the children of John Goodwin of Boston: "...In the day time
they were handled with so many sor