to heighten the sense of each other....  When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the meantime are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!...  When they shall see the dreadful miseries of the damned, and consider that they deserved the same misery, and that it was sovereign grace, and nothing else, which made them so much to differ from the damned, that if it had not been for that, they would have been in the same condition; but that God from all eternity was pleased to set his love upon them, that Christ hath laid down his life for them, and hath made them thus gloriously happy forever, O how will they adore that dying love of Christ, which has redeemed them from so great a misery, and purchased for them so great happiness, and has so distinguished them from others of their fellow-creatures!”

It was a strange creed that led men to teach such theories.  And when we learn that Jonathan Edwards was a man of singular gentleness and kind-heartedness, we realize that it must have tortured him to preach such doctrines, but that he believed it his sacred duty to do so.

The religion, however, that the Puritan woman imbibed from girlhood to old age went further than this; it taught the theory of a personal devil.  To the New England colonists Satan was a very real individual capable of taking to himself a physical form with the proverbial tail, horns, and hoofs.  Hear what Cotton Mather, one of the most eminent divines of early Massachusetts, has to say in his Memorable Providences about this highly personal Satan:  “There is both a God and a Devil and Witchcraft:  That there is no out-ward Affliction, but what God may (and sometimes doth) permit Satan to trouble his people withal:  That the Malice of Satan and his Instruments, is very great against the Children of God:  That the clearest Gospel-Light shining in a place, will not keep some from entering hellish Contracts with infernal Spirits:  That Prayer is a powerful and effectual Remedy against the malicious practices of Devils and those in Covenant with them."[8]

And His Satanic Majesty had legions of followers, equally insistent on tormenting humanity.  In The Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1692, Mather proves that there is a devil and that the being has specific attributes, powers, and limitations: