The rapidity with which the panic spread was most remarkable, and it is painful to notice the abject terror into which the population was thrown. Parents accused their children, and children their parents, and, in one case at least, a wife her husband. Some men were tied neck and heels until they would confess and accuse others.[99] It was a period of the most pitiful mental and spiritual cowardice, and those that were most directly responsible for the shameful condition of affairs were men who, from their learning and their position, should have been the leaders and sustainers of the popular conscience in soberness of mind and charity. But the ministers of New England had emphasized the necessity of a belief in witchcraft as a part of the Divine revelation. The Old Testament spoke of witches, and had said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” while the New Testament supplied the idea of diabolical possession; hence they argued, with a style of argument not yet disused, that any one who denied the existence of witchcraft was a Sadducee and an impugner of the truth of God’s Word. Soon the reasoning was extended to prove that any one who denied that the particular phenomena under discussion were caused by witchcraft was an enemy of religion. The ministers, as has been said, have an unenviable prominence in the accounts of this disastrous delusion. They were as forward in destroying the witches as their predecessors had been in persecuting the Quakers. They hounded on the judges and juries in their bloody work, they increased the popular excitement by their public fasts and prayers and sermons, they insulted the victims on the scaffold. It is no wonder that, under such leadership, the population was excited to madness. It was only when they found their own families and friends accused by those on whose testimony others as innocent had been destroyed, that they were able to recognize that the accusations were absurd and the evidence worthless. Yet it may be said on their behalf that they were not really as far in advance of the majority of their contemporaries as they imagined they were, and it is to their credit that, when their eyes were opened, they were opened thoroughly and not closed again. Cases of witchcraft now disappeared from New England, while in other lands, where there was the same sombre Calvinism but less enlightenment, as in Scotland, the delusion continued for many years.[100]
The theological spirit now devoted itself to barren questions of little moment, around which wordy battles raged and hatreds developed, only less destructive than those in the previous century because the divines were no longer the rulers of the state. Religion sank into a barren formalism, which had no noble or time-honored forms to redeem it from utter indifference. From this deplorable condition it was roused by three influences which led to a spiritual revival: the Episcopal movement in Connecticut, the preaching and writings of Jonathan Edwards in western Massachusetts, and the preaching of Whitefield. The dry bones once more lived, and the descendants of the Puritans manifest by their earnest activity and deep spirituality how stout and strong was the stock from which they have inherited many of their most precious characteristics. They may be thankful that the old bigotry has not returned, and that they are now saved from all danger of interfering with public affairs by the complete separation of church and state.
Panic terror of the supernatural, whenever it has occurred, has been a parody of the prevailing form of religion. When the religious ideas are at once narrow and introspective, when the social life is poor and unsatisfying, and when there is also a profound ignorance of bodily and mental physiology, we have the combined conditions for the ready and serious development of religious panic. Such were the circumstances of the witchcraft delusion that followed the religious revival due to the preaching of the Franciscan friars; such were the circumstances in Sweden in the seventeenth century, and in Scotland in the eighteenth; such were the circumstances in New England at the period we have considered. The isolated cases which appeared in various countries from time to time were the result of superstition and ignorance. That they did not cause a panic may be attributed in some cases to the better social condition; in others, to the presence in the community of men of sense and character who prevented the spread of delusion and calmed, instead of exciting, the minds of their fellows. It is one of the saddest features of the Salem trials, that though prominent men whose influence might have been expected to be exercised on the side of soberness, disbelieved in the reality of the “possession” and criticised privately the methods employed, yet they allowed the delusion to proceed to its tragical extent without interposing their authority to prevent or at least to denounce it. Brattle, in his account of the delusion, written in October 1692, mentions many by name who agreed with him in condemning the proceedings of the justices in Salem, and the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, but looked on while the unfortunates were tormented into confession and put to death at the demand of popular frenzy.[101]
Though we talk of the progress that the race has made in learning and enlightenment, it is alarming to notice how ineradicable are the superstitions of mankind, how germs which men deem dead really lurk dormant for ages, and then develop themselves with startling rapidity when they find the proper menstruum. Man, like other animals, seems to exhibit a tendency from time to time to revert to the original type, and to reproduce the physiognomy of long-perished races, with their fears and their hatreds, their low spiritual conceptions and their dominant animal passions. It is the work of education, of civilization, and of religion to strive against this tendency. We can only hope that as men have, in spite of this, made steady progress in many directions, and have conquered and are conquering the animal that is in them, they may in time get the better of all the evil legacies which their primeval ancestors have bequeathed them. Modern science has removed the fear of the plague in all civilized countries and is lessening the danger of the cholera; in like manner, we may hope the old terrors will also in time be swept away, and man be freed from any danger of their recurrence.
NOTES.
[51] Even Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, wise and good as he was, recorded in his History his direful forebodings occasioned by the appearance of a monstrosity which the unfortunate Mary Dyer, who was afterwards hanged as a Quaker, had brought into the world. History of New England, i. 261–3.
[52] Demonologie, in forme of a dialogue, 1st Ed., Edinburgh, 1597, 4to.
[53] 1 Jac. I. c. 12.
[54] State Trials, vol. ii. pp. 786–862.
[55] Baxter, Richard, D. D., The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, p. 53.