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to set up the standard of independence in the Puritan colonies.

      Many executions occurred in Lancashire, in Suffolk, Essex, and Huntingdonshire, where the infamous scoundrel "Witch-finder-General" Matthew Hopkins, under the sanction of the courts, was "pricking," "waking," "watching," and "testing" persons suspected or accused of witchcraft, with fiendish ingenuity of indignity and torture. Says James Howell in his Familiar Letters, in 1646:

      "We have multitudes of witches among us; for in Essex and Suffolk there were above two hundred indicted within these two years, and above the half of them executed."

      "Within the compass of two years (1645–7), near upon three hundred witches were arraigned, and the major part of them executed in Essex and Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them more and more, and persons of good quality are executed daily."

      Scotland set its seal on witchcraft as a crime by an act of its parliament so early as 1563, amended in 1649. The ministers were the inquisitors and persecutors. They heard the confessions, and inflicted the tortures, and their cruelties were commensurate with the hard and fast theology that froze the blood of mercy in their veins.

      The trials were often held by special commissions issued by the privy council, on the petition of a presbytery or general assembly. It was here that those terrible instruments of torture, the caschielawis, the lang irnis, the boot and the pilliewinkis, were used to wring confessions from the wretched victims. It is all a strange and gruesome story of horrors told in detail in the state trial records, and elsewhere, from the execution of Janet Douglas—Lady Glammis—to that of the poor old woman at Dornoch who warmed herself at the fire set for her burning. So firmly seated in the Scotch mind was the belief in witchcraft as a sin and crime, that when the laws against it were repealed in 1736, Scotchmen in the highest stations of church and state remonstrated against the repeal as contrary to the law of God; and William Forbes, in his "Institutes of the Law of Scotland," calls witchcraft "that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are wrought by a power derived from the devil."

      This glance at what transpired on the continent and in England and Scotland is of value, in the light it throws on the beliefs and convictions of both Pilgrim and Puritan—Englishmen all—in their new domain, their implicit reliance on established precedents, their credulity in witchcraft matters, and their absolute trust in scriptural and secular authority for their judicial procedure, and the execution of the grim sentences of the courts, until the revolting work of the accuser and the searcher, and the delusion of the ministers and magistrates aflame with mistaken zeal vanished in the sober afterthought, the reaction of the public mind and conscience, which at last crushed the machinations of the Devil and his votaries in high places.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      "Hence among all the superstitions that have 'stood over' from primeval ages, the belief in witchcraft has been the most deeply rooted and the most tenacious of life. In all times and places until quite lately, among the most advanced communities, the reality of witchcraft has been accepted without question, and scarcely any human belief is supported by so vast a quantity of recorded testimony."

      "Considering the fact that the exodus of Puritans to New England occurred during the reign of Charles I, while the persecutions for witchcraft were increasing toward a maximum in the mother country, it is rather strange that so few cases occurred in the New World." New France and New England (pp. 136–144), FISKE.

      The forefathers believed in witchcraft—entering into compacts with the Devil—and in all its diabolical subtleties. They had cogent reasons for their belief in example and experience. They set it down in their codes as a capital offense. They found, as has been shown abundant authority in the Bible and in the English precedents. They anchored their criminal codes as they did their theology in the wide and deep haven of the Old Testament decrees and prophecies and maledictions, and doubted not that "the Scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of all men in all duties which they are to perform to God and men."

      Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven, early in their history enacted these capital laws:

      In Massachusetts (1641):

      "Witchcraft which is fellowship by covenant with a familiar spirit to be punished with death."

      "Consulters with witches not to be tolerated, but either to be cut off by death or banishment or other suitable punishment." (Abstract New England Laws, 1655.)

      In Connecticut (1642):

      "If any man or woman be a witch—that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit—they shall be put to death." Exodus xxii, 18; Leviticus xx, 27; Deuteronomy xviii, 10, 11. (Colonial Records of Connecticut, Vol. I, p. 77).

      In New Haven (1655):

      "If any person be a witch, he or she shall be put to death according to" Exodus xxii, 18; Leviticus xx, 27; Deuteronomy xviii, 10, 11. (New Haven Colonial Records, Vol. II, p. 576, Cod. 1655).

      These laws were authoritative until the epidemic had ceased.

      Witches were tried, condemned, and executed with no question as to due legal power, in the minds of juries, counsel, and courts, until the hour of reaction came, hastened by doubts and criticisms of the sources and character of evidence, and the magistrates and clergy halted in their prosecutions and denunciations of an alleged crime born of delusion, and nurtured by a theology run rampant.

      "They had not been taught to question the wisdom or the humanity of English criminal law." (Blue Laws—True and False, p. 15, TRUMBULL.)

      Here and there in New England, following the great immigration from Old England, from 1630–40, during the Commonwealth, and to the Restoration, several cases of witchcraft occurred, but the mania did not set its seal on the minds of men, and inspire them to run amuck in their frenzy, until the days of the swift onset in Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1692, when the zenith of Satan's reign was reached in the Puritan colonies.

      A few words about the tragedy at Salem are relevant and essential. They are written because it was the last outbreak of epidemic demonopathy among the civilized peoples; it has been exploited by writers abroad, who have left the dreadful record of the treatment of the delusion in their own countries in the background; it was accompanied in some degree by like manifestations and methods of suppression in sister colonies; it was fanned into flames by men in high station who reveled in its merciless extirpation as a religious duty, and eased their consciences afterwards by contrition, confession and remorse, for their valiant service in the army of the theological devil; and especially for the contrasts it presents to the more cautious and saner methods of procedure that obtained in the governments of Connecticut and New Haven at the apogee of the delusion.

      What say the historians and scholars, some of whose ancestors witnessed or participated in the tragedies, and whose acquaintance with the facts defies all challenge?

      "It is on the whole the most gruesome episode in American history, and it sheds back a lurid light upon the long tale of witchcraft in the past." (Fiske's New France and New England, 195.)

      "The sainted minister in the church; the woman of the scarlet letter in the market place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both." (Scarlet Letter, HAWTHORNE.)

      "We are made partners in parish and village feuds. We share in the chimney corner gossip, and learn for the first time how many mean and merely human motives, whether consciously or unconsciously, gave impulse and intensity to the passions of the actors in that memorable tragedy which dealt the death blow in this country to the belief in Satanic compacts." (Among my Books—Witchcraft, p. 142, LOWELL.)

      "The tragedy was at an end. It lasted about six months, from the first accusations in March until the last executions in September. … It was an epidemic of mad superstitious fear, bitterly to be regretted, and a stain upon the

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