As we
have no wish, however, to make these pages the medium of a theological or
metaphysical controversy, we shall deal tenderly with certain important
events, that most of the writers, who were cotemporary with the facts,
assert took place in the Colonies of New-England, at and about the period
of which we are now writing. It is sufficiently known that the art of
witchcraft, and one even still more diabolical and direct in its origin,
were then believed to flourish, in that quarter of the world, to a degree
that was probably in a very just proportion to the neglect with which most
of the other arts of life were treated.
There is so much grave and respectable authority, to prove the existence
of these evil influences, that it requires a pen hardier than any we
wield, to attack them without a suitable motive. "Flashy people," says the
learned and pious Cotton Mather, Doctor of Divinity and Fellow of the
Royal Society, "may burlesque these things; but when hundreds of the most
sober people, in a country where they have as much mother wit, certainly,
as the rest of mankind, _know them to be true_, nothing but the absurd and
froward spirit of Sadducism can question them.
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