other
like matters, which had been introduced at the Trials, as proofs of
spectral agency, were easily resolvable into the visions and vagaries of
a "deluded imagination," "a phantasy in the brain," "phantasma before
the eyes."

Mr. Hale limits the definition of a witch to the following: "Who is to
be esteemed a capital witch among Christians? viz.: Those that being
brought up under the means of the knowledge of the true God, yet, being
in their right mind or free use of their reason, do knowingly and
wittingly depart from the true God, so as to devote themselves unto, and
seek for their help from, another God, or the Devil, as did the Devil's
Priests and Prophets of old, that were magicians."--_Page 127._

As he had refuted, and utterly discarded, the whole system of evidence
connected with spectres of the living or ghosts of the dead, the above
definition rescued all but openly profane, abandoned, and God-defying
people from being prosecuted for witchcraft. Mather transcribes, as a
quotation, what seems to be the foregoing definition, but puts it thus:
"A person that, having the free use of reason, doth knowingly and
willingly seek and obtain of the Devil, or of any other God, besides the
true God Jehovah, an ability to do or know strange things, or things
which he cannot by his own humane abilities arrive unto. This person is
a witch."

The latter part of the definition thus transcribed, has no justification
in Hale's language, but is in conflict with the positions in his book.
Mather says, "the author spends whole Chapters to prove that there yet
is a witch." He omits to state, that he spends twice as many Chapters to
prove that the evidence in the Salem cases was not sufficient for that
purpose. Upon the whole it can hardly be considered a fair transcript of
Mr. Hale's account. He dismisses the subject, once for all, in a curt
and almost disrespectful style--"But thus much for this manuscript."

Whoever examines the manner in which he, in this way, gets rid of the
subject, in the _Magnalia_, must be convinced, I think, that he felt no
satisfaction in Mr. Hale's book, nor in the state of things that made it
necessary for him to give the whole matter the go-by. If the public mind
had retained its fanatical credulity, or if Mather's own share in the
delusion of 1692 had been agreeable in the retrospect, it cannot be
doubted that it would have afforded THE GREAT THEME, of his great book.
All the strange learning, p