[44] Bishop, Second Part, 46, 120.
[45] Besse, ii. 387.
[46] “And you shewed your Spirit, who ran away from England, and could not abide the sufferings of your purse, and a Prison, and when you were got beyond Sea, then you could Hang, and Burn, and Whip, God’s Creatures, and the true Subjects of England; yet you would have the name of Christians who have cast away all Humanity and Christianity, by your fury, rage, and Nebuchadnezzar’s spirit; who are worse than the very Indians, whose name stinks both among Indians and Christians, which is become a proverb and a common Cry, The bloody Crimes of New England, a company of rotten Hypocrites which fled from Old England to save their purses and themselves from Imprisonment, and then can Hang, and Burn, and Whip, and spoil the Goods of such as come out of England to inhabit among them, only for being called Quakers.... Are these the men that fled for Religion all people may say, that now Hang, Burn, Imprison, Cut, Fine, and spoil the Goods, and drink the blood of the innocent. God will give you a Cup of trembling, that you shall be a by-word, and a hissing to all your neighbours.” Bishop, Second Part, 146, 147.
[47] See [Note 83], on the next Essay.
[48] Bishop, 67.
[49] Bishop, Second Part, 139. Besse, ii. 270.
[50] Hutchinson, History of Massachusets-Bay, i. 223.
II.
THE WITCHES.
The story of the witchcraft delusion in New England is a sequel and companion-piece to the history of the conflict with the Quakers. Both exhibit the least attractive side of our forefathers, and both point the moral that the intermeddling by ecclesiastics in matters of public policy is dangerous to the state. It is a strange tale of superstition and of panic, painful to dwell upon, but necessary to a proper comprehension of the characters of the leaders of New England, and of the conditions under which the struggling colonies developed their strong and distinct individuality. It should always be remembered that belief in witchcraft was not a peculiarity of New England, and that the reason the colonists there have been judged so hardly for their panic is that men have felt that they had claimed to be superior to the men of their generation, and thus should be measured by a higher standard. Their claim had some justification. The leaders of thought in New England had advanced in some directions far beyond their contemporaries; in political insight and political adroitness they have had few equals in any period; but they were hampered and burdened by the very religion which to their fathers had been a gospel of liberty and a source of inspiration. This had become a theology with its dogmas and its rules; the devout and earnest ministers who had contended for their faith in England, or had braved the perils of the seas and the loneliness of the wilderness to be free to worship God as they chose, had given place to the second generation, who had never known suffering, and were therefore ignorant of mercy; men who were enthusiastic indeed, but not so much enthusiastic for religion as for their creed; not so zealous for Christ as for their own peculiar way of worshipping him. The result had been a general lowering of spiritual tone, which was recognized and freely acknowledged and deplored by the best men of the period. It seems inevitable that this hardening and narrowing should follow ages of contest and struggle. When the faith becomes a war-cry, it necessarily loses much of its spirituality. Beliefs for which one age has suffered become crystallized into formulas for the next, and divines wonder at the hardness of men’s hearts in refusing obedience to what once indeed had been a law of life, but by being made a commandment has become a law unto death.
So, while our New England forefathers were clever politicians, shrewd and adroit men of affairs, practical and full of ingenious expedients, intelligent and clear-headed about their secular business, they retrograded in religion, and became formalists and controversialists. Theological orthodoxy supplanted intelligent Christianity, and New England religion sank into a dreary series of wranglings about Cambridge platforms and Saybrook platforms, half-way covenants and whole-way covenants, old lights and new lights, consociations and associations, until it became, for a time at least, more arid and lifeless than ever had been the Church of England, against the formalism of which they were continually protesting. It is true that a few isolated cases of witchcraft are found occurring in the early history of the colonies, and it was then that the severe laws were enacted; yet the serious trouble, the great panic, did not come until the first generation, “those men who had seen the works of the Lord,” had been gathered unto their fathers. One cannot imagine John Cotton playing the part of his namesake Cotton Mather, or John Winthrop, superstitious as he was, in the place of Stoughton. Even Wilson and Norton, who exulted in the blood of the Quakers, thought witch-finding a cowardly yielding to popular folly. The responsibility of the men of the first generation lies rather in the character of the religious training they gave their successors, a gloomy religion, which in themselves had been mitigated by a piety, sincere if fanatical, and perhaps also by some recollection of the brighter experiences of their childhood’s days in the more genial religious life of England, a life their children had never known.