but encouragement of her husband.  She constantly prayed in the family, and attended the public worship on the Lord’s days.  He declared that he could not blame her, for that she served a god that was above his; but that as to himself, his god’s continued kindness obliged him not to forsake his service.”  It appears, from the above and similar passages, that Dr. Cotton Mather, an honest and devout, but sufficiently credulous man, had mistaken the purpose of the tolerant powah.  The latter only desired to elude the necessity of his practices being brought under the observant eye of an European, while he found an ingenious apology in the admitted superiority which he naturally conceded to the Deity of a people, advanced, as he might well conceive, so far above his own in power and attainments, as might reasonably infer a corresponding superiority in the nature and objects of their worship.

[Footnote 6:  “On Remarkable Mercies of Divine Providence.”]

From another narrative we are entitled to infer that the European wizard was held superior to the native sorcerer of North America.  Among the numberless extravagances of the Scottish Dissenters of the 17th century, now canonized in a lump by those who view them in the general light of enemies to Prelacy, was a certain ship-master, called, from his size, Meikle John Gibb.  This man, a person called Jamie, and one or two other men, besides twenty or thirty females who adhered to them, went the wildest lengths of enthusiasm.  Gibb headed a party, who followed him into the moorlands, and at the Ford Moss, between Airth and Stirling, burned their Bibles, as an act of solemn adherence to their new faith.  They were apprehended in consequence, and committed to prison; and the rest of the Dissenters, however differently they were affected by the persecution of Government, when it applied to themselves, were nevertheless much offended that these poor mad people were not brought to capital punishment for their blasphemous extravagances; and imputed it as a fresh crime to the Duke of York that, though he could not be often accused of toleration, he considered the discipline of the house of correction as more likely to bring the unfortunate Gibbites to their senses than the more dignified severities of a public trial and the gallows.  The Cameronians, however, did their best to correct this scandalous lenity.  As Meikle John Gibb, who was their comrade in captivity, used to disturb their worship in jail by his maniac howling, two of them took turn about to hold him down by force, and silence him by a napkin thrust into his mouth.  This mode of quieting the unlucky heretic, though sufficiently emphatic, being deemed ineffectual or inconvenient, George Jackson, a Cameronian, who afterwards suffered at the gallows, dashed the maniac with his feet and hands against the wall, and beat him so severely that the rest were afraid that he had killed him outright.  After which specimen of fraternal chastisement, the lunatic,