estament injunction, which had sent such multitudes in Europe to the
torture-chamber and the stake, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

Such clergymen as Noyes, Parris, and Mather, aided by such judges
as Stoughton and Hathorn, left nothing undone to stimulate these
proceedings. The great Cotton Mather based upon this outbreak of disease
thus treated his famous book, Wonders of the Invisible World, thanking
God for the triumphs over Satan thus gained at Salem; and his book
received the approbation of the Governor of the Province, the President
of Harvard College, and various eminent theologians in Europe as well as
in America.

But, despite such efforts as these, observation, and thought upon
observation, which form the beginning of all true science, brought in a
new order of things. The people began to fall away. Justice Bradstreet,
having committed thirty or forty persons, became aroused to the
absurdity of the whole matter; the minister of Andover had the good
sense to resist the theological view; even so high a personage as Lady
Phips, the wife of the Governor, began to show lenity.

Each of these was, in consequence of this disbelief, charged with
collusion with Satan; but such charges seemed now to lose their force.

In the midst of all this delusion and terrorism stood Cotton Mather firm
as ever. His efforts to uphold the declining superstition were heroic.
But he at last went one step too far. Being himself possessed of a mania
for myth-making and wonder-mongering, and having described a case
of witchcraft with possibly greater exaggeration than usual, he was
confronted by Robert Calef. Calef was a Boston merchant, who appears
to have united the good sense of a man of business to considerable
shrewdness in observation, power in thought, and love for truth; and
he began writing to Mather and others, to show the weak points in the
system. Mather, indignant that a person so much his inferior dared
dissent from his opinion, at first affected to despise Calef; but, as
Calef pressed him more and more closely, Mather denounced him, calling
him among other things "A Coal from Hell." All to no purpose: Calef
fastened still more firmly upon the flanks of the great theologian.
Thought and reason now began to resume their sway.

The possessed having accused certain men held in very high respect,
doubts began to dawn upon the community at large. Here was the
repetition of that which had set men thinking in the Germ