Rule collected by Robert Calef, merchant of Boston in New England." The
partisans of the Mathers displayed their hostility to this book by
publicly burning it; and the Mathers themselves kept up the feeling so
strongly that years afterwards, when Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton,
wrote his father's life, he says sneeringly of Calef: "There was a
certain disbeliever in Witchcraft who wrote against this book" (his
father's 'Wonders of the Invisible World'), "but as the man is dead, his
book died long before him." Calef died in 1720.

The witchcraft delusion had, however, been sufficiently dispelled to
prevent the recurrence of any other such persecutions; and those who
still insisted on their truth were restrained to the comparatively
harmless publication and defence of their opinions. The people of Salem
were humbled and repentant. They deserted their minister, Mr. Paris,
with whom the persecution had begun, and were not satisfied until they
had driven him away from the place. Their remorse continued through
several years, and most of the people concerned in the judicial
proceedings proclaimed their regret. The jurors signed a paper
expressing their repentance, and pleading that they had laboured under a
delusion. What ought to have been considered still more conclusive,
many of those who had confessed themselves witches, and had been
instrumental in accusing others, retracted all they had said, and
confessed that they had acted under the influence of terror. Yet the
vanity of superior intelligence and knowledge was so great in the two
Mathers that they resisted all conviction. In his _Magnalia_, an
ecclesiastical history of New England, published in 1700, Cotton Mather
repeats his original view of the doings of Satan in Salem, showing no
regret for the part he had taken in this affair, and making no
retraction of any of his opinions. Still later, in 1723, he repeats them
again in the same strain in the chapter of the "Remarkables" of his
father entitled "Troubles from the Invisible World." His father,
Increase Mather, had died in that same year at an advanced age, being in
his eighty-fifth year. Cotton Mather died on the 13th of February, 1728.

Whatever we may think of the credulity of these two ecclesiastics, there
can be no ground for charging them with acting otherwise than
conscientiously, and they had claims on the gratitude of their
countrymen sufficient to overbalance their error of judgment on this
occasion.