37 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Countless miracles were represented as taking place within the 

 land, but they were almost always miracles of terror. Disease, 

 storm, famine, every awful calamity that fell upon mankind or 

 blasted the produce of the soil was attributed to the direct inter- 

 vention of spirits ; and Satan himself is represented as constantly 

 appearing in a visible form upon the earth. . . . Such teachings 

 necessarily created the superstition of witchcraft ; it was the re- 

 flection by a diseased imagination of the popular theology. More- 

 over, it was produced by the teaching of the clergy, and was 

 everywhere fostered by their persecution." Thus it is that the 

 annals of Puritanism and Calvinism in Scotland are red with 

 tales of the thumbscrew and the boot and the witches' bridle and 

 the axe and the stake. While the clergy of the Established Church 

 in England were comparatively free from any desire to persecute, 

 while torture was only very rarely resorted to ; while, in a word, 

 persecution was carried on by the people in a very half-hearted 

 way, in Scotland there were being enacted, at the express com- 

 mand of the clergy, scenes which rivaled those in Roman Catho- 

 lic Europe. " And yet these Presbyterian clergymen of Scotland 

 were men who had often shown, in the most trying circumstances, 

 the highest and most heroic virtues. They were men whose 

 courage had never flinched when persecution was raging ; men 

 who had never paltered with their conscience to attain the favors 

 of a king ; men whose self-devotion and zeal in their sacred call- 

 ing had seldom been surpassed ; men who in all the private rela- 

 tions of life were doubtless amiable and affectionate. They were 

 but illustrations of the great truth that when men have come to 

 regard a certain class of their fellow-creatures as doomed by the 

 Almighty to eternal and excruciating agonies, and when their the- 

 ology directs their minds with intense and realizing earnestness 

 to the contemplation of such agonies, the result will be an indiffer- 

 ence to the suffering of those whom they deem the enemies of 

 their God, as absolute as it is perhaps possible for human nature 

 to attain." 



But Scotland also became sick of blood and fire. The last 

 execution for witchcraft was held in 1722, although in 1773 the 

 divines of the associated Presbytery passed a resolution declar- 

 ing their belief in witchcraft and deploring the general skep- 

 ticism. 



It is not necessary to enter upon the history of witchcraft in 

 America. Its details are known to all. Nothing so clearly brings 

 to one's mind the reality of this delusion and the persecution it 

 entailed as the court papers, preserved as they are in the archives 

 of Essex County, Massachusetts. As one looks upon those faded 

 records and reads of question and cross-question, of plea for 

 mercy and stern refusal, he can again see those awful trials ; he 



