He remained standing
during the public reading of the paper. This was an act of true
manliness and dignity of soul." (_Upham's Salem Witchcraft_, Vol. II, p.
441).
Grim, stern, narrow as he was, this man in his self-judgment commands
the respect of all true men.
The ministers stood with the magistrates in their delusion and
intemperate zeal. Two hundred and sixteen years after the last witch was
hung in Massachusetts a clearer light falls on one of the striking
personalities of the time--Cotton Mather--who to a recent date has been
credited with the chief responsibility for the Salem prosecutions.
Did he deserve it?
Robert Calef, in his _More Wonders of the Invisible World_, Bancroft in
his _History of the United States_, and Charles W. Upham in his _Salem
Witchcraft_, are the chief writers who have placed Mather in the
foreground of those dreadful scenes, as the leading minister of the
time, an active personal participant in the trials and executions, and a
zealot in the maintenance of the ministerial dignity and domination.
On the other hand, the learned scholar, the late William Frederick
Poole, first in the _North American Review_, in 1869, and again in his
paper _Witchcraft in Boston_, in 1882, in the _Memorial History of
Boston_, calls Calef an immature youth, and says that his obvious
intent, and that of the several unknown contributors who aided him, was
to malign the Boston ministers and to make a sensation.
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