We must inquire."
HATHORNE:
"Dear sir, we have inquired;
Sifted the matter thoroughly through and through,
And then resifted it."
MATHER:
"If God permits
These evil spirits from the unseen regions
To visit us with surprising informations,
We must inquire what cause there is for this,
But not receive the testimony borne
By spectres as conclusive proof of guilt
In the accused."
HATHORNE:
"Upon such evidence
We do not rest our case. The ways are many
In which the guilty do betray themselves."
MATHER:
"Be careful, carry the knife with such exactness
That on one side no innocent blood be shed
By too excessive zeal, and on the other
No shelter given to any work of darkness."
_New England Tragedies_ (4, 725), LONGFELLOW.
Whatever Mather's caution to the court may have been, or his leadership
in learning, or his ambition and his clerical zeal, there is thus far no
evidence, in all his personal participation in the tragedies, that he
lifted his hand to stay the storm of terrorism once begun, or cried halt
to the magistrates in their relentless work. On the contrary, after six
victims had been executed, August 4, 1692, in _A Discourse on the
Wonders of the Invisible World_, Mather wrote this in deliberate, cool
afterthought:
"They--the judges--have used as judges have heretofore done, the
spectral evidences, to introduce their farther inquiries into the lives
of the persons accused; and they have thereupon, by the wonderful
Providence of God, been so strengthened with other evidences that some
of the witch-gang have been fairly executed.
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