Witch Craft

Around the seventeenth century, the belief in witches and witch craft was almost everywhere. The Church of Rome, more than three hundred years ago, allowed punishments for the use of witch craft and after that thousands of suspected people were burned alive, drowned or hanged. In the sixteenth century, more than one hundred thousand accused and convicted people burned in the flames, in Germany. In England, enlightened men adopted the belief. The famous Sir Matthew Hale, who flourished during the civil war, the commonwealth and the period of the restoration of monarchy, repeatedly sentenced persons to death accused of witch craft. The Puritans brought the belief with them to America. They established laws for the punishment of witches, and before 1648, four people had suffered death for the supposed offence, in the neighborhood of Boston. The ministers of the gospel there were shadowed by the delusion, and because of their powerful social influence, they did more to foster the wild excitement and produce the distressing results of what is known in history as "Salem witch craft," than all others.
In 1688, a wayward daughter of John Goodwin of Boston, about thirteen years of age, accused a servant girl of stealing some of the family linen. The servant's mother, a "wild Irish woman" and a Roman Catholic, impassioned disapproval the accuser as a false witness. The young girl, in revenge, pretended to be bewitched by the Irish woman. Some others of her family followed her example. They would alternately become deaf, dumb and blind, bark like dogs and purr like cats, but none of them lost their appetites or sleep. The Rev. Cotton Mather, a simple and conceited minister rushed to Goodwin's house to ease the witchery by prayer. Wonderful were the supposed effects of his desire. The devil was controlled by them for the time. Then four other ministers of Boston and one of Salem, as superstitious as himself, joined Mather they spent a whole day in the house of the "afflicted" in fasting and prayer, the result of which was the delivery of one of the family from the power of the witch. This was enough proof for the minds of the ministers that there must be a witch in the case, and these ignorant minister prosecuted the ignorant Irish woman as such. She was confused before the court, and spoke sometimes in her native Irish language, which nobody could understand, and which her accusers and judges explain into involuntary confession.