The age was one of wonders, and Mather devotes an entire book to what he calls Thaumaturgia.  Many of its statements are bold impositions on the reader’s credulity; but there was much which, in those days of ignorance, must have seemed to Mather to be undeniable phenomena of a mysterious nature.  After the colony had escaped many minor dangers, a new ordeal of suffering awaited it in a faith in sorcery, resulting in the horrible episode of Salem witchcraft, which may be considered the darkest stain upon the age.  The death-beds and parting scenes in such a community were cherished features in domestic history, and almost every cottage could boast its Euthanasy.  Ministering angels not only hovered over the couch, but touched their harps in melodies, whose music sometimes reached the human ear.  Youth tender and inexperienced claimed a share in these triumphs, and Nathanael Mather, though but seventeen, expires in all the maturity of a saintly old age.

Coming down to the survivors of the first emigration, we find them lingering amid the respect and veneration of the community, and their graves were deemed worthy of patriarchal honor.  After their departure the ministry seems to have lost tone and fervor.  The union of church and state swept them into secularities, and thus impaired their strength.  So great was the decline, that by the close of the first century, formality chilled the churches, and the people bewailed their coldness, while the aged wept at the remembrance of by-gone days.  Cotton Mather had prophesied of a coming time when churches would have to be gathered out of the churches in the colony.  The cry of the saints was ’Return, how long, O Lord, and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.’  Some of the more hopeful maintained that the midnight only heralded an approaching dawn.  Two ministers on Long Island, Barber and Davenport, had received divine assurance of a return of power, and held themselves in anxious waiting.  At last, brilliant flashes began to play athwart the sky, and instead of the meteoric glare which some feared, it indicated the purer sunbeam, in whose genial power the church was to rejoice for more than a third of a century.  Whitefield’s advent sent a thrill through all New England.  He sailed from Charleston to Newport, where venerable parson Clapp, tottering with age, welcomed him as though he had been an angel of God.  Whitefield’s power was comparable to the supernatural, and it was in this view John Foster, at a later day, found the only solution of his success.  In the pulpit his appearance and manners exceeded the dreams of apostolic grace—­a youth of elegant form, with voice of enchanting melody, clear blue eyes, an endurance which knew no exhaustion—­a fancy which ranged both worlds—­were all fused by a burning zeal for the salvation of souls.  Such was Whitefield at twenty-five, and as such he was worthy of that ovation which he received at Boston, when governor and council went out in form to welcome