“These witches ... have met in hellish randez-vouszes.... In these hellish meetings, these monsters have associated themselves to do no less a thing than to destroy the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, in these parts of the world.... We are truly come into a day, which by being well managed might be very glorious, for the exterminating of those, accursed things,... But if we make this day quarrelsome,... Alas, O Lord, my flesh trembles for fear of thee, and I am afraid of thy judgments.” [Footnote: Idem, pp. 49-60.]

While reading such words the streets of Salem rise before the eyes, with the cart dragging Martha Cory to the gallows while she protests her innocence, and there, at her journey’s end, at the gibbet’s foot, stands the Rev. Nicholas Noyes, pointing to the dangling corpses, and saying: “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there.” [Footnote: More Wonders, p. 108.]

The sequence of cause and effect is sufficiently obvious. Although at a moment when the panic had got beyond control, even the most ultra of the clergy had been forced by their own danger to counsel moderation, the conservatives were by no means ready to abandon their potent allies from the lower world; the power they gave was too alluring. “‘Tis a strange passage recorded by Mr. Clark, in the life of his father, That the people of his parish refusing to be reclaimed from their Sabbath breaking, by all the zealous testimonies which that good man bore against it; at last [one night] ... there was heard a great noise, with rattling of chains, up and down the town, and an horrid scent of brimstone.... Upon which the guilty consciences of the wretches, told them, the devil was come to fetch them away; and it so terrify’d them, that an eminent reformation follow’d the sermons which that man of God preached thereupon.” [Footnote: Wonders of the Invisible World, p. 65.] They therefore saw the constant acquittals, the abandonment of prosecutions, and the growth of incredulity with regret. The next year Cotton Mather laid bare the workings of their minds with cynical frankness. “The devils have with most horrendous operations broke in upon our neighbourhood, and God has at such a rate overruled all the fury and malice of those devils, that ... the souls of many, especially of the rising generation, have been thereby waken’d unto some acquaintance with religion; our young people who belonged unto the praying meetings, of both sexes, apart would ordinarily spend whole nights by the whole weeks together in prayers and psalms upon these occasions; ... and some scores of other young people, who were strangers to real piety, were now struck with the lively demonstrations of hell ... before their eyes.... In the whole—the devil got just nothing, but God got praises, Christ got subjects, the Holy Spirit got temples, the church got addition, and the souls of men got everlasting benefits.” [Footnote: More Wonders, p. 12.]

Mather prided himself on what he had done. “I am not so vain as to say that any wisdom or virtue of mine did contribute unto this good order of things; but I am so just as to say, I did not hinder this good.” [Footnote: Idem, p. 12.] Men with such beliefs, and lured onward by such temptations, were incapable of letting the tremendous power superstition gave them slip from their grasp without an effort on their own behalf; and accordingly it was not long before the Mathers were once more at work. On the 10th of September, 1693, or about nine months after the last spasms at Salem, and when the belief in enchantments was fast falling into disrepute, a girl named Margaret Rule was taken with the accustomed symptoms in Boston. Forthwith these two godly divines repaired to her bedside, and this is what took place:—

Then Mr. M—— father and son came up, and others with them, in the whole were about thirty or forty persons, they being sat, the father on a stool, and the son upon the bedside by her, the son began to question her:

Margaret Rule, how do you do? Then a pause without any answer.

Question. What. Do there a great many witches sit upon you? Answer. Yes.

Question. Do you not know that there is a hard master?

Then she was in a fit. He laid his hand upon her face and nose, but, as he said, without perceiving breath; then he brush’d her on the face with his glove, and rubb’d her stomach (her breast not being covered with the bed clothes) and bid others do so too, and said it eased her, then she revived.