The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697). John M. Taylor

in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation for the detection of witchcrafts."

[E] An illustration: The child Ann Putnam, in her testimony against the Rev. Mr. Burroughs, said that one evening the apparition of a minister came to her and asked her to write her name in the devil's book. Then came the forms of two women in winding sheets, and looked angrily upon the minister and scolded him until he was fain to vanish away. Then the women told Ann that they were the ghosts of Mr. Burroughs' first and second wives whom he had murdered.

      Did Longfellow, after a critical study of the original evidence and records, truly interpret Mather's views, in his dialogue with Hathorne?

      MATHER:

       "Remember this, That as a sparrow falls not to the ground

       Without the will of God, so not a Devil

       Can come down from the air without his leave.

       We must inquire."

       HATHORNE:

       "Dear sir, we have inquired;

       Sifted the matter thoroughly through and through,

       And then resifted it."

       MATHER:

       "If God permits

       These evil spirits from the unseen regions

       To visit us with surprising informations,

       We must inquire what cause there is for this,

       But not receive the testimony borne

       By spectres as conclusive proof of guilt

       In the accused."

       HATHORNE:

       "Upon such evidence

       We do not rest our case. The ways are many

       In which the guilty do betray themselves."

       MATHER:

       "Be careful, carry the knife with such exactness

       That on one side no innocent blood be shed

       By too excessive zeal, and on the other

       No shelter given to any work of darkness."

       New England Tragedies (4, 725), LONGFELLOW.

      Whatever Mather's caution to the court may have been, or his leadership in learning, or his ambition and his clerical zeal, there is thus far no evidence, in all his personal participation in the tragedies, that he lifted his hand to stay the storm of terrorism once begun, or cried halt to the magistrates in their relentless work. On the contrary, after six victims had been executed, August 4, 1692, in A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, Mather wrote this in deliberate, cool afterthought: