Then when
at last he swung above them, Cotton Mather rode among the throng and told
them of his guilt, and how the fiend could come to them as an angel of
light, and so the work went on. They cut him down and dragged him by his
halter to a shallow hole among the rocks, and threw him in, and there they
lay together with the rigid hand of the wizard Burroughs still pointing
upward through his thin shroud of earth. [Footnote: _More Wonders_,
pp. 103, 104.]
By October it seemed as though the bonds of society were dissolving;
nineteen persons had been hanged, one had been pressed to death, and eight
lay condemned; a number had fled, but their property had been seized and
they were beggars; the prisons were choked, while more than two hundred
were accused and in momentary fear of arrest; [Footnote: _Idem_, p. 110.]
even two dogs had been killed. The plague propagated itself; for the
only hope for those cried out upon was to confess their guilt and turn
informers. Thus no one was safe. Mr. Willard, pastor of the Old South, who
began to falter, was threatened; the wife of Mr. Hale, pastor of Beverly,
who had been one of the great leaders of the prosecutions, was denounced;
Lady Phips herself was named. But the race who peopled New England had a
mental vigor which even the theocracy could not subdue, and Massachusetts
had among her sons liberal and enlightened men, whose voice was heard,
even in the madness of the terror.
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