al of them have been convicted of
a very damnable witchcraft: yea, more than one, twenty
have confessed that they have signed unto a book which
the devil showed them, and engaged in his hellish
design, of bewitching and ruining our lands.

"We know not, at least I know not, how far the
delusions of Satan may be interwoven into some
circumstances of the confessions; but 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 agree;
especially when we have a thousand preternatural
things every day before our eyes, wherein the
confessors do acknowledge their concernment, and give
demonstration of their being so concerned. 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 the
confessions of a crime which we see actually
committed, it is a thing prodigious, beyond the
wonders of the former ages, and it threatens not less
than a sort of dissolution upon the world.

"Now, by these confessions 'tis agreed that the devil
has made a dreadful knot of witches in the country,
and by the help of witches has dreadfully increased
the knot; that these witches have driven a trade of
commissioning their confederate spirits to do all
sorts of mischiefs to their neighbours. Whereupon
there have ensued such mischievous consequences upon
the bodies and estates of the neighbourhood as could
not otherwise be accounted for."

Human beings were not always the only victims of superstition in olden
times, for we have information of dumb animals suffering on account of
it being thought they were active agents of Satan. The Inquisition in
Portugal in 1601, in its sanguinary infatuation, condemned to the
flames, for being possessed of the devil, a horse belonging to an
Englishman, who had taught it to perform uncommonly clever tricks. And
the poor animal was publicly burned at Lisbon. Instances are also on
record of swine being burned, under the suspicion that they, too, were
helpers of the devil.

Through sorcery, Mr. Mather thought witnesses we