Puritans. According to Cotton Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_,
at the trial of one of these martyrs to superstition, George Burroughs,
he was accused by eight of the confessing witches "as being the head
actor at some of their hellish rendezvouzes, and one who had the promise
of being a king in Satan's kingdom, now going to be erected. One of them
falling into a kind of trance affirmed that G.B. had carried her away
into a very high mountain, where he shewed her mighty and glorious
kingdoms, and said, 'he would give them all to her, if she would write
in his book.'"

In such an era, of course, the attempt was too often made to explain
events, not in the light of common reason but as visitations of God to
try the faith of the folk, or as devices of Satan to tempt them from the
narrow Path. Such an affliction as "nerves" was not readily
acknowledged, and anyone subject to fits or nervous disorders, or any
child irritable or tempestuous might easily be the victim of witchcraft.
Note what Increase Mather has to say on the matter when explaining the
case of the children of John Goodwin of Boston: "...In the day time
they were handled with so many sorts of Ails, that it would require of
us almost as much time to Relate them all, as it did of them to Endure
them. Sometimes they would be Deaf, sometimes Dumb, and sometimes Blind,
and often, all this at once.... Their necks would be broken, so that
their Neck-bone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it; and
yet on the sudden, it would become again so stiff that there was no
stirring of their Heads...."[21]

As we have noted in previous pages, the morbidness and super-sensitive
spiritual condition of the colonists brought on by the peculiar social
environment had for many years prepared the way for just such a tragic
attitude toward physical and mental ailments. The usual safety vents of