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by wholly invisible, were sometimes forced upon the afflicted, which when they have with much reluctancy swallowed, they have swoln presently, so that the common medicines for poisons have been found necessary to relieve them; yea, sometimes the spectres in the struggles have so dropt the poisons, that the standers-by have smelt them and viewed them, and beheld the pillows of the miserable stained with them. Yet more, the miserable have complained bitterly of burning rags run into their forcibly distended mouths; though no body could see any such clothes, or indeed any fires in their chambers, yet presently the scalds were seen plainly by every body on the mouths of the complainers, and not only the smell, but the smoke of the burning sensibly filled the

chambers.

"Once more, the miserable exclaimed of branding irons, heating at the fire on the hearth to mark them; now the standers-by could see no irons, yet they could see distinctly the prints of them in the ashes, and smell them too, as they were carried by the not-seen furies unto the poor creatures for whom they were intended; and those poor creatures were thereupon so stigmatized with them, that they will bear the marks of them to their dying day. Nor are these the tenth part of the prodigies that fell out among the inhabitants of New England.

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Flashy people," adds the old Puritan divine, “may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people, in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Saducism can question them. I have not yet mentioned one thing that will not be justified, if it be necessary, by the oaths of more considerate persons than can ridicule these odd phenomena." i

Verily, if all these things be true, we must admit that the demons were particularly intimate with the early Puritans of New England; rather more intimate, in fact, than was at all comfortable for the latter. Shrewd and calculating as were the early Yankees, the imps who played such fantastic tricks among them, were much shrewder. Those devices of the spindle, of the sheet, of the branding-irons, in particular, were truly capital! The invisible spirits knew their trade much better than to try wooden hams or nutmegs, or to attempt the impossible task of overreaching their friends in a bargain. Cunning tricksters were those same witches of New England!

Now, we are Sadducees enough to laugh at all those impostures, and also at the Pharisees who gave them credit and importance. But alas for the poor witches of New England! They were doomed to have other tormentors than the spirits of the invisible world. The Puritan fathers leagued with the demons to torture them to death. What the "devils and the spectres" could not or would not do with their sheets and spindles, and branding-irons, that the early Puritans boldly accomplished with the halter. The extermination of the luckless witches was decreed on earth, as a carrying out of the mischievous plot originally devised in the lower invisible world.

Space fails us to recount all the trials for witchcraft, and all the executions which ensued, chiefly at and about Salem, in the year 1692.

Blue Laws, &c., p. 299, seq

They are given in great detail by our author of the Blue Laws, and also by Bancroft, in the third volume of his "History of the United States.” We will content ourselves with a few extracts from this latter highly respectable historian :

"At the trial of George Burroughs, a minister, the bewitched persons pretended to be dumb. Who hinders those witnesses,' says Stoughton (the deputy governor), 'from testifying?' 'I suppose the devil,'answered Burroughs. 'How comes the devil,' retorted the chief judge, 'so loath to have any testimony borne against you?' And the question was effective. Besides he had given proofs of great, if not preternatural muscular strength. Cotton Mather calls the evidence 'enough;' the jury gave a verdict of guilty."

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At the execution of Burroughs, Cotton Mather made one of the most heartless, and almost fiendish speeches we have ever chanced to read: he seemed even to exult over the imminent damnation of the convicted wizard! And another preacher, named Noyes, on seeing eight persons hung up together as witches, had the heartlessness to exclaim: "THERE HANG EIGHT FIREBRANDS OF HELL!!” Alas for the tender mercies of the pilgrim fathers!

Well, the delusion at length subsided; but not until a great number of crazy, "afflicted," or innocent persons, had been sacrificed to the insatiable Moloch of religious fanaticism, or rather to the senseless idol of a stupid superstition. The Rev. Cotton Mather thus coolly winds up his narrative of the New England witchcraft:

"Now upon a deliberate review of these things, his excellency (Sir William Phips) first reprieved, and then pardoned many of them that had been condemned; and there fell out several strange things that caused the spirit of the country to run as vehemently on the acquitting of all the accused, as it by mistake ran at first upon the condemning of them. In fine, the last courts that sate upon this thorny business, finding that it was impossible to penetrate into the whole meaning of the things that had happened, and that so many unsearchable cheats were interwoven into the conclusion of a mysterious business, which perhaps had not crept thereinto at the beginning of it, they cleared the accused as fast as they tried them; and within a little while the afflicted were most of them delivered out of their troubles also; and the land had peace restored unto it, by the God of peace treading Satan under foot."

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That is, the good Puritans first hung the witches, and then found out that they were perhaps innocent! Shrewd jurists they, and enlightened, merciful Christians! We leave other comments on this "thorny business" to our readers; merely remarking that it ill becomes the children of the Puritans to taunt Catholics with superstition, fanaticism, intolerance, or cruelty.

We conclude this paper with the following humorous passage from Washington Irving's "History of New York:"

"The witches were all burnt, banished, or panic-struck, and in a little while there was not an ugly old woman to be found throughout New England,-which is doubtless one reason why all the young women

1 Vol. ili. p. 84.

2 See ibid. p. 93.

3 Blue Laws, &c., p. 306

there are so handsome. Those honest folk who had suffered from their incantations gradually recovered, excepting such as had been afflicted with twitches and aches, which, however, assumed the less alarming aspects of rheumatism, sciatics, and lumbagoes,—and the good people of New England, abandoning the study of the occult sciences, turned their attention to the more profitable hocus-pocus of trade, and soon became expert in the legerdemain art of turning a penny. Still, however, a tinge of the old leaven is discernible, even unto this day, in their characters, witches occasionally start up among them in different disguises, as physicians, civilians, and divines. The people at large show a keenness, cleverness, and a profundity of wisdom that savor strongly of witchcraft,— and it has been remarked, that whenever any stones fall from the moon, the greater part of them is sure to tumble into New England.

1 Irving's works, vol. i, p. 120

Reviews, Essays, and Lectures.

PART II.-THEOLOGICAL.

XXI. THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE.

TEMPORAL AND ETERNAL.

What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?St. Matthew xvi, 26.

Is this an enlightened age?—Enlightenment and empiricism-Material progress-Constant agitation and fever-Rest and motion-Self-complacency-Two classes of extravagance pointed out- -And illustrated--Doctrine of progress applied to religion-Degrading religion to an earthly standardReason and faith-Incident related by St. Augustine-Reasoning backwards-A tower of BatelModern systems of philosophy-True and false liberty-Evils growing out of sectarianism-Carry ing out a false principle-Private judgment-The great struggle and final issue-Protestantism and enlightenment-American infidelity-Parallel lines of reasoning adopted by the sects and by infidels—Fanaticism and infidelity-Mammonism-Money and virtue-Mammon worship in churohes-Utilitarianism-Wrong views of education--Religious indifference and latitudinarianism -Frightful moral disorders-Fruits of Protestantism-The great problem of the age.

SOME malicious wight has ventured to call this age the sœculum humbuggianum; but we greatly prefer to call it the age of enlightenment. This latter epithet, besides being vastly more polite and fashionable, is, at the same time, perhaps more nearly connected with the truth. True, we have empiricism in every thing; in medicine, in science, in politics, and even in religion! The empiric deals not only in quack medicines and in political legerdemain, but also in the once hallowed tenets of a holy religion! Our modern mountebanks feast us on Millerism and Mormonism, as well as on Fourierism and Mesmerism, to say nothing of a thousand and one other new-fangled notions and isms. When the wisest of men said, "There is nothing new under the sun," he could scarcely have directed his prophetic vision to our enlightened age. We have certainly hit upon some new things, which would have greatly astonished and startled even Solomon himself.

Still our confidence in this being an enlightened period is not at all shaken. The extravagances, to which we have just alluded, are but excep tions to the general spirit of our age. Enlightenment is the rule, empiricism the exception. The latter is a superabundant growth on a rich and fertile soil. The noxious weeds with their wild luxuriance may cumber the ground uselessly, but they cannot wholly choke the many healthy and

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useful plants which flourish thereon. And it may be, that by a judicious system of cultivation, we may finally succeed in plucking out the evil weeds altogether, and in causing the goodly plants to shoot forth their branches, and to yield their abundant fruits, for the healing of the nations, without let or hindrance.

Yes, we are free to avow the belief that ours is, in some respects, an enlightened age. In certain points of view, the present is far in advance of any preceding age. As far as mere earthly interests and comforts are concerned, we can boast of great improvements over our more simple and unsophisticated ancestors. All the useful arts have attained a perfection never dreamed of by them, even in their wildest reveries. In navigation, in commerce, and in ship-building; in warlike accoutrements and in naval equipments; in the facilities of intercourse both by sea and by land; and in the appliances of domestic comfort; we are immeasurably ahead of our forefathers in all past ages. We travel a thousand miles now in a shorter time, and with more comfort, than our ancestors did a hundred; we traverse the ocean with as much facility as they did an arm of the sea, or an inland lake. By the invention of steam-navigation and the great improvements recently made therein, we have almost succeeded in annihilating time and space. We have brought the whole world into close and intimate correspondence. The old and new worlds, once separated by an almost impassable gulf, are now brought almost into contact. The most ordinary articles of our daily consumption, such as spice, pepper, and tea, are brought from the very antipodes, and, in return, we spread out before the antipodes our own products. Thus the very extremities of the globe are made near to each other; and the children of the earth, inhabiting the remotest boundaries thereof, are brought together, and associate as brethren of the same great family.

Still we are not satisfied. We are always in a restless fever of agitation and excitement. We are never at rest, but when we are in motion. We forget what is past, and we bend forward to what is future. Past discoveries, great and magnificent as they are, are all counted as nothing; we anticipate something much more brilliant in the future. The surface of society is like that of the ocean lashed into foamy billows by the winds of heaven. But, unlike the sea, we are never at rest. The great characteristic of the age is PROGRESS. We must progress in every thing; in the arts, in the sciences, in legislation, in philosophy, and even in religion! We are always looking restlessly ahead. Inventions, which once dazzled the world with their brilliancy and promise of usefulness, have been long since superseded and forgotton. The cumbrous and imperfect steamboat machinery of Blasco de Garay and of Biancas were superseded by the more simple and manageable apparatus of Fulton; while this too, in its turn, has given way to the more available methods suggested by recent discoveries.

Little did even Fulton dream of the wonderful extent to which his dis. covery, or rather improvement, would be rendered available for the purposes

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