Without the least purpose or wish to cover up or extenuate the follies, excesses, or outrages I am about to describe, into which the community suffered itself to be led in the witchcraft proceedings of 1692,—­with a desire, on the contrary, to make the lesson then given of the mischief resulting from misguided enthusiasm, and which will always result when popular excitement is allowed to wield the organized powers of society, as impressive as facts and truth will justify,—­I feel bound to say, in advance, that there are some considerations which we must keep before us, while reviewing the incidents of the transaction.  The theological, legal, and philosophical doctrines and the popular beliefs, on which it was founded, have, as I have shown, led, in other countries and periods, to similar, and often vastly more shameful, cruel, and destructive results.  But there was something in the affair, as it was developed here, that has arrested the notice of mankind, and clothed it with an inherent interest, beyond all other events of the kind that have elsewhere or ever occurred.

The moral force engendered in the civilization planted on these shores, and pervading the whole body of society, supplied a mightier momentum, as it does to this day, and ever will, to the movement of the people, acting in a mass and as a unit, than can anywhere else be found.  A population, invigorated by hardy enterprise, and the constant exercise of all the faculties of freedom, and actuated throughout by individual energy of character, must be mightier in motion than any other people.  Such a population multiplies tenfold its physical forces, by the addition of moral and intellectual energies.  The men of the day and scene we are now to contemplate, however deluded, to whatever extremities carried, were controlled by fixed, absolute, sharply defined, and, in themselves, great ideas.  They believed in God.  They also believed in the Devil.  They bowed in an adoration that penetrated their inmost souls, before the one as a being of infinite holiness:  they regarded the other as a being of an all but infinite power of evil.  They feared and worshipped God.  They hated and defied the Devil.  They believed that Satan was waging war against Jehovah, and that the conflict was for the dominion of the world, for the establishment or the overthrow of the Church of Christ.  The battle, they fully believed, could have no other issue than the salvation or the ruin of the souls of men.  This was not, with them, a mere technical, verbal creed.  It was a deep-seated conviction, held earnestly with a clear and distinct apprehension of its import, by every individual mind.  For this warfare, they put on the whole armor of faith, rallied to the banner of the Most High, and met Satan face to face.  In this one great idea, a stern, determined, unflinching, all-sacrificing people concentrated their strength.  No wonder that the conflict reached a magnitude which made it observable to the whole