The chains, riveted by the old Gothic laws at that period existing in England, and by which millions of human creatures were held in a state of mental and physical bondage, were left behind, it is true; but the link which bound them to superstition remained unbroken.
Apart from this, however, their landing on Plymouth Rock was the dawn of a new era, and it gave an additional spring to human enterprise, “opened new trains of thought, new paths of gain and of information.”
“What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine,
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
They sought a faith’s pure shrine!”
Passing over the dark days of witchcraft and the persecution of the Quakers, the colonial history brightens up under a more tolerant rule. That the belief in witchcraft was a delusion arising from ignorance, under the influence of which many persons became frantic, there can be no doubt. And yet there was a method in their madness so cunningly carried out that it deceived many far more enlightened. A writer speaking upon the subject says, “It is but justice to the inhabitants of New England to observe that, though the present age may censure the past for its superstition, neither England nor any other nation is entitled to cast the first stone at them. More persons were put to death in England in a single county, in a few months, than suffered in all the colonies during the whole period of their existence.”
The scenes that were enacted in New England during this epidemical reign of insanity gradually yielded to the influence of reason, which under proper religious discipline once more assumed its rule. One of the chief causes which tended to arouse the mind from its mental darkness was the fact of a dog being taken up on suspicion, and actually hanged, as an accomplice of his master, who was accused of witchcraft![22] This act capped the climax of folly. People began to wonder if such things could be; and they actually took the case of the dog into serious consideration, and then came to this very wise conclusion,—that he fell a martyr to the folly and ignorance of a few fanatics. They then began to ridicule those who assumed the power to terrify the people and who had exercised it to a bitter end over men and animals. This did more to bring men to their senses than all the preaching and reasoning of the elders previously.[23]
Naturally, while these idiotic scenes were enacting, the arts and sciences, commerce and manufactures, were materially neglected; but when the gloom which fanaticism had cast over this portion of the colonies had passed away, the dawn of reason and civilization awoke her benighted children to a new state of existence.