proceeding to your view, not altogether from its intrinsic interest, but because, perhaps, it affords the key to interpret the course of this ill-starred man in his wrangles with his congregation, and his terrible prominency in the awful scenes of the witchcraft delusion.  He seemed to have had a love of excitement that was irrepressible, an all but insane passion for getting up a scene.  When we come to the details of our story, it will be for a charitable judgment to determine whether this trait of his nature may not be regarded as the cause of all the woes in which he involved others and became involved himself.

The church records are, in one respect, in singular contrast with the parish records.  The latter are often silent in reference to matters of interest at the time, which might without impropriety have been entered in them.  They are confined strictly to votes and proceedings in legal meetings, or what purport to have been meetings legally called; and we look in vain for comments or notices relating to outside matters.  Except when kept by Sergeant Thomas Putnam, they are defective and imperfect.  The church records, while made by Mr. Parris, are full of side remarks, and touches of criticism concerning whatever was going on.  This makes them particularly interesting and valuable now.  They are composed in their author’s clear, natural, and sprightly style; and, although for the most part in an exceedingly small hand, are legible with perfect ease, and give us a transcript, not only of the formal doings of the church, but of the writer’s mind and feelings about matters and things in general.  We gather from them by far the greater part of all we know relating to his quarrel with his congregation.

This subject constantly engrossed his thoughts.  He was continually introducing, at church meetings, complaints against the conduct of the parish committee, and enlarging upon the wrongs he was suffering at their hands.  He took occasion on Lecture days, if not in ordinary discourses on the Lord’s Day, to give all possible circulation and publicity to his grievances.  The effect of this was, instead of bringing his people into subjection and carrying his points against them, to aggravate their alienation.  His manner of dealing with the difficulties of the situation into which they had been brought was harsh and exasperating, and utterly injudicious, imprudent, and mischievous in all its bearings, producing a condition of things truly scandalous.  His notions and methods, acquired in his mercantile life; his haggling with the people about the terms of his salary; and his general manner and tone, particularly so far as they had been formed by residence in West-India slave Islands,—­were thoroughly distasteful, and entirely repugnant, to the feelings, notions, ideas, and spirit of the farmers of Salem Village.  At their meetings, they showed a continually increasing strength of opposition to him, and were careful to appoint committees who could not be brought under his influence, and would stand firm against all outside pressure.