“But when you have catched a witch of more than ordinary devilment,” he cried, striking the palm of one hand with his clinched fist, “and who, by a fair and most subtle showing, would betray the cause of Christ to her Master, let no weak pity unnerve you, but have at her and hang her, lest but one such witch left in the land acquire power to wreak untold evil and undo all we have done.”
Still once again did his deeply concerned gaze seek the prisoner’s face, hoping to behold therein some sign of softening.
Beholding it not he sighed heavily. He would willingly have given his life to save her soul to the good of God and to the glory of his own self-immolation.
“I become more and more convinced that my failure to bring this miserable maid to confession, and indeed the whole assault of the Evil Angels upon the country,” he continued, using those words which have been generally accepted as a revelation of his marvellous credulity and self-righteousness, “were intended by Hell as a particular defiance unto my poor endeavours to bring the souls of men unto heaven. Yet will I wage personal war with Satan to drive him from the land.”
He raised his eyes, a light of exaltation sweeping over his face.
“And in God’s own appointed time,” he cried in a voice that quivered with emotion, “His Peace will again descend upon this fair and gracious land, and we shall be at rest from persecution.”
Whatever of overweening vanity his words expressed, none present seeing his enraptured face might have judged him harshly.
No infatuated self-complacency alone prompted his words, but rather his earnest conviction that he was indeed the instrument of God, and believed himself by reason of his long fastings and prayer, more than any person he knew, in direct communion with the invisible world.
And if his vanity and self-sufficiency held many from loving him, there were few who did not involuntarily do him honour.
Having finished he sat down, laid his Bible on his knee, and folded his arms across his breast as heretofore. None, looking at him then as he sat facing the people, his chest puffed out with incomparable pride, young, with every sign of piety, withal a famous scholar, and possessed of exceptional personal comeliness, saw how the shadow of the future already touched him, when for his honest zeal in persecuting witches he should be an object of insult and ridicule in Boston Town, people naming their negroes Cotton Mather after him.