were
common. Prayer opened every public meeting, secular as well as
religious. The doctrine of special providences was pressed to a
ridiculous extreme. The devil was believed in no less firmly than God,
and indefinitely great power ascribed to him. The Catechism--book second
in authority only to the Bible--contained of his Satanic Majesty a cut,
which children were left, not to say taught, to suppose as correct a
likeness as that of Cromwell, which crowned the mantels of so many
homes.

[Illustration: Increase Mather.]

In a people thus trained the miracle is not that witchcraft and
superstition did so much mischief, but so little. Had it not been for
their sturdy Saxon good sense its results must have proved infinitely
more sad. The first remarkable case of sorcery in New England occurred
at Boston, in 1688. Four children of a pious family were affected in a
peculiar manner, imitating the cries of cats and dogs, and complaining
of pains all over their bodies. These were the regulation symptoms of
witch-possession, which presumably they had often heard discussed. An
old Irish serving-woman, indentured to the family, who already bore the
name of a witch, was charged with having bewitched them, and executed,
the four ministers of Boston having first held at the house a day of
prayer and fasting.

[Illustration: Cotton Mather.]

Young Cotton Mather, grandson of the distinguished Rev. John Cotton, a
man of vast erudition and fervent piety, was at this time colleague to
his father, Increase Mather, as pastor of the Boston North Church. His
imagination had been abnormally developed by fasts and vigils, in which
he believed himself to hold uncommonly close communication with the
Almighty. His desire to provide new arms for faith against the growing
unbelief of his time led him to take one of the "bewitched" children to
his house, that he might note and describe the ways of the devil in her
case. The results he soon after published in his "Memorable Providences
Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions." This work admitted no doubt as
to the reality of the demoniac possessions, which indeed it affected to
demonstrate forever. All the Boston ministers signed its preface,
certifying to its "clear information" that "both a God and a devil, and
witchcraft" existed. "Nothing too vile," it alleged, "can be said of,
nothing too hard can be done to, such a horrible iniquity as witchcraft
is." The publication excited great attention