ing on. The statement of Mr. Hale
shows how effectual and destructive the evidence, authorized by
Bernard's book, was; and it also proves how unjust, to the Judges and
Magistrates, is the charge made upon them by the Reviewer, that they
disregarded and violated the advice of the Ministers. In admitting a
species of evidence, wholly spectral, which was fatal, more than any
other, to the Prisoners, they followed a rule laid down by the very
authors whose "directions" the Ministers, in their _Advice_, written by
"Mr. Mather the younger," enjoined upon them to follow. It is
noticeable, by the way, that, in that document, they left Gaule out of
the "triumvirate;" Mather finding nothing in his book to justify the
admission of spectral testimony.

He urges the force of the evidence, from confessions, with all possible
earnestness.

"One would think all the rules of understanding human affairs are at an
end, if after so many most voluntary harmonious confessions, made by
intelligent persons, of all ages, in sundry towns, at several times, we
must not believe the main strokes, wherein those confessions all
agree."--_Page 8._

He continues to press the point thus: "If the Devils now can strike the
minds of men with any poisons of so fine a composition and operation,
that scores of innocent people shall unite, in confessions of a crime,
which we see actually committed, it is a thing prodigious, beyond the
wonders of the former ages; and it threatens no less than a sort of a
dissolution upon the world. Now, by these confessions, it is agreed,
that the Devil has made a dreadful knot of witches in the country, and
by the help of witches has dreadfully increased that knot; that these
witches have driven a trade of commissioning their confederate spirits,
to do all sorts of mischiefs to the neighbors, whereupon there have
ensued such mischievous consequences upon the bodies and estates of the
neighborhood, as could not otherwise be accounted for; yea, that at
prodigious Witch-meetings the wretches have proceeded so far as to
concert and consult the methods of rooting out the Christian religion
from this country, and setting up, instead of it, perhaps a more gross
Diabolism, than ever the world saw before. And yet it will be a thing
little short of miracle, if, in so spread a business as this, the Devil
should not get in some of his juggles, to confound the discovery of all
the rest."

In the last sentence of the foregoing passage,