Today in Salem: the prominent Rev Increase Mather is furious. Twenty people have died. Eight more have been sentenced. More than one hundred people, including children, are still in prison. This week yet another parent has asked the afflicted girls — rather than God — to say who’s hurting his child. Then two dogs were killed; one of them obviously an innocent animal. And all of this because of the shrieking and swooning of a handful of girls who say they can see specters.
Today Mather has written an essay on the matter, and, as the most influential minister in New England, he intends it to stop the Trials entirely.
“It were better that ten suspected witches should escape,” he’s written, “than that one innocent person should be condemned.”
Now his son, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, is reading the essay to a group of area ministers. He is a stammerer, and in the best of times speaks slowly. These are not the best of times, though, so he articulates each word even more slowly, in a clear and authoritative voice, so the ministers can hear and consider his father’s main points:
The Devil CAN impersonate an innocent person to hurt others.
Proof is ONLY shown by confession or testimony from two people about real-world evil.
Seeing specters is NOT proof.
Touch tests are DANGEROUS. Asking an accused person to touch and heal the afflicted is a jaw-dropping mockery of the power of Jesus Christ to touch and cure the sick. It also tempts the Devil to touch and hurt that person.
LEARN MORE: These four points are distilled from a 74-page essay. Many details (and much florid writing) have been omitted. But the main points stand.
The essay can be found in its entirety here and is titled:
Cases of Conscience
concerning evil
SPIRITS
Personating Men,
Witchcrafts, infallible Proofs of
Guilt in such as are accused
with that Crime.
By Increase Mather,
President of Harvard College at Cambridge, and Teacher of
a Church at Boston in New-England.
Tomorrow in Salem: SEIZED and SENT: the Sheriff takes cattle, and the ministers send a letter