SOURCE: "The Judgment of the Witches," in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 1953. Reprint by Beacon Press, 1961, pp. 191–208.

In the following excerpt, Miller examines the impact made on the witchcraft trials by jeremiads, or Puritan sermons, which emphasized that God brings affliction on sinners and stressed the need for confession and repentance.

The most curious of all the facts in that welter we call Salem witchcraft is this: if you expunge from the record those documents that arise directly out of the affair, and those which treat it historically, like the Magnalia or Hale's and Calef's accounts, and a few twinges of memory such as appear in Sewall's Diary, the intellectual history of New England up to 1720 can be written as though no such thing ever happened. It had no effect on the ecclesiastical or political situation, it does not figure in the institutional or ideological...