These extended extracts are given from Lawson’s discourse, partly to enable every one to estimate the effect it must have produced, under the circumstances of the occasion, but mainly because they present a living picture of the sentiments, notions, modes of thinking and reasoning, and convictions, then prevalent.  No description given by a person looking back from our point of view, not having experienced the delusions of that age, no matter who might attempt the task, could adequately paint the scene.  The foregoing extracts show better, I think, than any documents that have come down to us, how the subject lay in the minds of men at that time.  They bring before us directly, without the intervention of any secondary agency, the thoughts, associations, sentiments, of that generation, in breathing reality.  They carry us back to the hour and to the spot.  Deodat Lawson rises from his unknown grave, comes forth from the impenetrable cloud which enveloped the closing scenes of his mortal career, and we listen to his voice, as it spoke to the multitudes that gathered in and around the meeting-house in Salem Village, on Lecture-day, March 24, 1692.  He lays bare his whole mind to our immediate inspection.  In and through him, we behold the mind and heart, the forms of language and thought, the feelings and passions, of the people of that day.  We mingle with the crowd that hang upon his lips; we behold their countenances, discern the passions that glowed upon their features, and enter into the excitement that moved and tossed them like a tempest.  We are thus prepared, as we could be in no other way, to comprehend our story.

The sermon answered its end.  It re-enforced the powers that had begun their work.  It spread out the whole doctrine of witchcraft in a methodical, elaborate, and most impressive form.  It justified and commended every thing that had been done, and every thing that remained to be done; every step in the proceedings; every process in the examinations; every kind of accusation and evidence that had been adduced; every phase of the popular belief, however wild and monstrous; every pretension of the afflicted children to preternatural experiences and communications, and every tale of apparitions of departed spirits and the ghosts of murdered men, women, and children, which, engendered in morbid and maniac imaginations, had been employed to fill him and others with horror, inspire revenge, and drive on the general delirium.  And it fortified every point by the law and the testimony, by passages and scraps of Scripture, studiously and skilfully culled out, and ingeniously applied.  It gave form to what had been vague, and authority to what had floated in blind and baseless dreams of fancy.  It crystallized the disordered vagaries, that had been seething in turbulent confusion in the public mind, into a fixed, organized, and permanent shape.