“It cost the Court a wonderful deal of trouble to hear the testimonies of the sufferers; for, when they were going to give in their depositions, they would for a long while be taken with fits, that made them quite uncapable of saying any thing.  The chief judge asked the prisoner, who he thought hindered these witnesses from giving their testimonies; and he answered, he supposed it was the Devil.  The honorable person then replied, ’How comes the Devil so loath to have any testimony borne against you?’ Which cast him into very great confusion.”

From what fell from him, at the preliminary examination, it is evident that it did not occur to him as a possibility that human nature could be capable of the guilt of such a wilful fabrication and imposture on the part of the “afflicted children.”  He beheld their sufferings, and he knew his own innocence.  He felt, whatever his theological creed might have been, that a Devil was required to explain the mystery.  The apparent sufferings of the accusing witnesses convinced Court, jury, and all, of the guilt of the accused.  The logic of the chief-justice was perfectly absurd.  For, if the Devil caused the sufferings, he was an adverse party to the prisoner.  This, however, overthrows the whole theory of the prosecution, which was that the prisoner and the Devil were in league with each other.  But the judge, jury, and people, all equally blinded and stupefied by the delusion, did not see it; and they chuckled over the alleged confusion of the prisoner.  All thoughtful persons will concur in Mr. Burroughs’s opinion, that, if ever a diabolical power had possession of human beings, it was in the case of the wretched creatures who enacted the part of the accusing girls in the witchcraft proceedings.  In his account of the trial, Mather makes statements which show that he was privy to the fact, that testimony, subsequently taken, was lodged with the evidence belonging to the case.  The documents prove that it was done to an extent beyond what he acknowledges.

Considering that none dared to show the least sympathy with the persons on trial, that they had none to counsel or stand by them, that the public passions were incensed against them as against no other persons ever charged with crime,—­it being vastly more flagrant than any other crime, a rebellion against heaven and earth, God and man; a deliberate selling of the soul to the Arch-enemy of souls for the ruin of all other souls,—­in view of all these things, it is truly astonishing, that, by the documents themselves, proceeding, as in almost all cases they do, from hostile and imbittered sources, we are compelled to the conviction, that, in their imprisonments, trials, and deaths, the victims of this savage delusion manifested—­in most cases eminently, and in all substantially—­the marks, not only of innocent, but of elevated and heroic minds.  A review of what can be gleaned in reference to Mr. Burroughs at Casco Bay and Salem Village, and