SOURCE: "Witchcraft," in Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest, Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1891, pp. 88-123.

In the following excerpt, Wendell provides a detailed account of Mather's role in the witchcraft trials and surveys the author's writings on witchcraft.

What happened in the next two years was of less consequence to New England than the matters we have been considering. To Cotton Mather, however, and to the cause which throughout his life he had most at heart,—the preservation, the restoration, of the pure polity of the fathers,—these two years were fatal. It was the great tragedy of witchcraft, I think, that finally broke the power of theocracy: it was almost surely the part Cotton Mather played in it that made his life, for the five and thirty years that were left him, a life—at least publicly—of constant, crescent failure. Tragic even if we join with those...