The prisoners took the ground, that the statements made by the witnesses, even if admitted, were not proof against them; for the Devil might employ the spectres of innocent persons, or of whomsoever he chose, without the knowledge of the persons whose shapes were thus used by him.  When Mrs. Ann Putnam swore that she had seen the spectre of Rebecca Nurse afflicting various persons; and that the said spectre acknowledged to her, that “she had killed Benjamin Houlton, and John Fuller, and Rebecca Shepard,”—­the answer of the prisoner was, “I cannot help it:  the Devil may appear in my shape.”  When the examining magistrate put the question to Susanna Martin, “How comes your appearance to hurt these?” Martin replied, “I cannot tell.  He that appeared in Samuel’s shape, a glorified saint, can appear in any one’s shape.”  The Rev. John Wise, in his noble appeal in favor of John Procter, argued to the same point.  But the chief-justice was inexorably deaf to all reason; compelled the jury to receive, as absolute law, that the Devil could not use the shape of an innocent person; and, as the “afflicted” swore that they saw the shapes of the prisoners actually engaged in the diabolical work, there was no room left for question, and they must return a verdict of “Guilty.”

In this way, innocent persons were slaughtered by a dogma in the mind of an obstinate judge.  Dogmas have perverted courts and governments in all ages.  A fabrication of fancy, an arbitrary verbal proposition, has been exalted above reason, and made to extinguish common sense.  The world is full of such dogmas.  They mislead the actions of men, and confound the page of history.  “The king cannot die” is one of them.  It is held as an axiom of political and constitutional truth.  So an entire dynasty, crowded with a more glorious life than any other, is struck from the annals of an empire.  In the public records of England, the existence of the Commonwealth is ignored; and the traces of its great events are erased from the archives of the government, which, in all its formulas and official papers, proclaims a lie.  A hunted fugitive, wandering in disguise through foreign lands, without a foot of ground on the globe that he could call his own, is declared in all public acts, parliamentary and judicial, and even by those assuming to utter the voice of history, to have actually reigned all the time.  In our country and in our day, we are perplexed, and our public men bewildered, by a similar dogma.  The merest fabric of human contrivance, a particular form of political society, is impiously clothed with an essential attribute of God alone; and ephemeral politicians are announcing, as an eternal law of Providence, that “a State cannot die.”  The mischiefs that result, in the management of human affairs, from enthroning dogmas over reason, truth, and fact, are, as they ever have been, incalculable.