Finally, the reaction set in, and the sober sense of the community set itself against the ravings and goadings of the more fanatical clergy and church members. The commission of the special court expired with the assembling of the General Court, and was not renewed. Phips, evidently fearing criticism from England, wrote to the Earl of Nottingham, disingenuously laying all the blame for the judicial proceedings on Stoughton, and quoted Increase Mather and the other divines.[[1153]] Courageous laymen, like Thomas Brattle and Robert Calef, both merchants, exerted their influence against the delusion; and when Mather tried to start another alarm in Boston, less than a year after the last execution at Salem, public opinion was arrayed solidly against him. In 1700, Calef's book in answer to Mather's “Wonders of the Invisible World” was printed in London and quickly imported into the colony. Though the rage of the Mathers, father and son, was unbounded, their cause had been thoroughly discredited, and their day was past. They belonged, in reality, to the sixteenth century, while Calef, the merchant, defending the cause of intellectual freedom with no weapon but that of common sense, belonged to the eighteenth, the dawn of which was now at hand.
It was the voice of that century to which the people were now to hearken. Thenceforth, happily for itself as well as for America, the church was to be unable to rely either upon political power or upon blind fanaticism to uphold its leadership—a leadership which now, perforce, took on a nobler form. The work of the founders was over. In the extension of their influence throughout the country, wherever we find groups of settlers from the New England states, we find, indeed the church, the common-school, and the town-meeting; but it is a liberalized church, a non-sectarian school, and a town-meeting in which the citizen's vote is not dependent upon the possession of any peculiar theological belief.
It was usual, in an earlier and less critical day, to trace all of New England's greatness, and of her noble contributions to our common American life, to the same little group of leaders, who were supposed to have done all because they did much. Life is not so simple as that, and in the founding of New England, and the development of her liberties, we must find place for English kings and statesmen, for colonial liberals and martyrs, as well as for Pilgrim Father and Puritan Priest.
THE END
[1088]. Mather sailed April 7, 1688. Andros Tracts, vols. III, pp. 130 ff., and II, pp. 274 ff. As the addresses which he carried with him were unsigned, and as they were merely issued “in the name of many Congregations,” it is impossible to say whom he really represented when he sailed.
[1089]. Andros Tracts, vol. III, pp. 146 f.
[1090]. Cal. State Pap., Col., 1689-92, pp. 4, 7.
[1091]. Andros Tracts, vol. II, p. 291. Cf., however, Cotton Mather, Diary, vol. I, p. 138 n.
[1092]. Andros Tracts, vols. II, p. 274, and III, p. 148; Palfrey, History, vol. III, p. 591 n.; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1689-92, pp. 6, 8, 11.