Of the long service in the new-built meeting-house I remember very little.  Beat of drums, not bells, called to church in those days, and the beat was to me as a funeral march.  The pale face of the preacher in the high pulpit overtowering us all was alight with stern zeal.  The elders, sitting in a row below the pulpit facing us, listened to the fierce diatribe against the dark arts with looks of approbation that boded ill for M. Picot; and at every fresh fusillade of texts to bolster his argument, the line of deacons below the elders glanced back at the preacher approvingly.  Rebecca sat on that side of the congregation assigned to the women with a dumb look of sympathy on the sweet hooded face.  The prisoners were not present.  At the end of the service the preacher paused; and there fell a great hush in which men scarce breathed, for sentence was to be pronounced.  But the preacher only announced that before handing the case to the civil court of oyer and terminer for judgment, the elders wished to hold it in meditation for another day.

The singing of the dismissal psalm began and a smothered cry seemed to break from Rebecca’s pew.  Then the preacher had raised his hands above bowed heads.  The service was over.  The people crowded solemnly out, and I was left alone in the gathering darkness—­alone with the ghosts of youth’s illusions mocking from the gloom.  Religion, then, did not always mean right!  There were tyrants of souls as well as tyrants of sword.  Prayers were uttered that were fitter for hearing in hell than in Heaven.  Good men could deceive themselves into crime cloaking spiritual malice, sect jealousy, race hatred with an unctuous text.  Here, in New England, where men had come for freedom, was tyranny masking in the guise of religion.  Preachers as jealous of the power slipping from their hands as ever was primate of England!  A poor gentleman hounded to his death because he practised the sciences!  Millions of victims all the world over burned for witchcraft, sacrificed to a Moloch of superstition in the name of a Christ who came to let in the light of knowledge on all superstition!

Could I have found a wilderness where was no human face, I think I had fled to it that night.  And, indeed, when you come to think of my breaking with Eli Kirke, ’twas the witch trial that drove me to the wilderness.

There was yet a respite.  But the Church still dominated the civil courts, and a transfer of the case meant that the Church would throw the onus of executing sentence on those lay figures who were the puppets of a Pharisaical oligarchy.

There was no time to appeal to England.  There was no chance of sudden rescue.  New England had not the stuff of which mobs are made.

I thought of appealing to the mercy of the judges; but what mercy had Eli Kirke received at the hands of royalists that he should be merciful to them?

I thought of firing the prison; but the walls were stone, and the night wet, and the outcome doubtful.