points not connected with witchcraft, was treated with special severity on that account, and made the victim of bigoted prejudice among his brethren and in the churches.  In this secret inquisition, he was called to account for not attending the communion service on one or two occasions; he being a member of the church at Roxbury.  It was also brought against him, that none of his children but the eldest had been baptized.  What the facts, in these respects, were, it is impossible to say; as we know of them only through the charges of his enemies.  After this, he was carried to the place of public meeting; and, as he entered the room, “many, if not all, the bewitched were grievously tortured.”  After the confusion had subsided, Susanna Sheldon testified that Burroughs’ two wives had appeared to her “in their winding-sheets,” and said, “That man killed them.”  He was ordered to look on the witness; and, as he turned to do so, he “knocked down,” as the reporter affirms, “all (or most) of the afflicted that stood behind him.”  Ann Putnam, and the several other “afflicted children,” bore their testimony in a similar strain against him, interspersing at intervals, all their various convulsions, outcries, and tumblings.  Mercy Lewis had “a dreadful and tedious fit.”  Walcot, Hubbard, and Sheldon were cast into torments simultaneously.  At length, they were “so tortured” that “authority ordered them” to be removed.  Their sufferings were greater than the magistrates and people could longer endure to look upon.  The question was put to Burroughs, “what he thought of these things.”  He answered, “it was an amazing and humbling providence, but he understood nothing of it.”  Throwing aside all the foolish and ridiculous gossip and all the monstrous fables that belong to the accusations against him, and looking at the only known facts in his history, it appears that Mr. Burroughs was a man of ingenuous nature, free from guile, unsuspicious of guile in others; a disinterested, humble, patient, and generous person.  He had suffered much wrong, and endured great hardships in life; but they had not impaired his readiness to labor and suffer for others.  There was no combativeness or vindictiveness in his disposition.  Even in the midst of the unspeakable outrages he was experiencing on this occasion, he does not appear to be incensed or irritated, but simply “amazed.”  To have such horrid crimes laid to him, instead of rousing a violent spirit within him, impressed him with a humbling sense of an inscrutable Providence.  There is a remarkable similarity in the manner in which Rebecca Nurse and George Burroughs received the dreadful accusations brought against them.  “Surely,” she said, “what sin hath God found out in me unrepented of that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?” His words are, “It is an humbling providence of God.”  The more we reflect upon this language, and go to the depths of the spirit that suggested it, the more we realize, that, in each case, it arose from a sanctified Christian heart, and is an attestation in vindication and in honor of the sufferers from whose lips it fell, that outweighs all passions and prejudices, reverses all verdicts, and commands the conviction of all fair and honest minds.