Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the majority.  Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as these:  “Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion! thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth! thou best to be spared of all mankind!”—­all of which are genuine epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton Mather, who collected them, “quills of the porcupine.”  They surpass even Dr. Chauncy’s catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major Phillips’s old mare was as lean as an Indian’s dog.

There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705.  A youth among the Friends wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:—­“Ruth, let us break from this unreasonable bondage.  I will give up my religion, and thou shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of England, and go to the Devil together.”  And they fulfilled the resolution, the Puritan historian says, so far as going into the Church, and marrying, and staying there for life.  But probably the ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.

With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions.  It must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or peculiar thing in New England.  The Church, the Scriptures, the mediaeval laws, had all made it a capital crime.  There had been laws against it in England for a hundred years.  Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers.  Sir Thomas Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them.  High legal and judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described this crime as definitely and seriously as any other.  In Scotland four thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl was burnt alive in Wuertzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty?  The only wonder is in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that “there were no witches on the earth, nor devils,—­except” (as they profanely added) “the New-England ministers, and such as they.”