“A. ‘I do not know the devil. I never did see him.’
“Q. ‘What lying spirit was it, then?’
“A. ‘It was a voice that I thought I heard.’
“Q. ‘What did it propound to you?’
“A. ‘That I should go no more to meeting. But I said I would; and did go the next Sabbath day.’”—Woodward’s Hist. Series, No. I. p. 37.
Although the timid prisoner said only that she thought she heard a voice, the reader will notice that she made no denial that she had previously said “that she would never be tied to that lying spirit any more;” therefore by fair implication she conceded that she had once, if not many times, heard a voice which she had openly spoken of as having been that of a lying spirit; and also that she had more or less been instructed by and followed his, her, or its advice. The fact that she was enjoined not to go to meeting any more, argues nothing either against the spiritual source of the advice, or the good intent of whoever gave it. She had long been a sickly, bed-ridden woman; therefore such advice might have been given by any wise Christian physician. We are not concerned with either the moral or religious states of invisible actors and speakers, but are looking specially for some of the more distinct evidences that invisible intelligences of some quality enacted Salem witchcraft, and, therefore, looking for the peculiar properties of both the embodied persons through and those upon whom they directly acted.
Sarah Osburn, though a secluded, respectable, inoffensive woman well advanced in years, was an early victim before the sweeping blast that rushed over the Village. Too feeble to endure the hardship of prison life, she died in jail before the day for her trial. She who heard voices from out the realm of silence, possessed inner faculties in fit condition to permit effluxes that reached and annoyed the mediumistic children, who traced them back to her, and made statements which brought her under suspicion of being a covenanter with the devil. Such capabilities constituted her crime—her witchcraft—and incited a devil-fighting people to persecution which hastened her exit to the realm from which the advisory voices had come upon her ears.