solid, energetic act of imagination; but when it had to deal with
intricate tangles of mind and heart, it became credulity. That lurking
unhealthiness spread from the centre, and soon overcame their judgment
entirely. The bodeful glare of the witchcraft delusion makes this
fearfully clear. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft,"--one of the most
vigorous, true, and thorough of American histories, without which no one
can possess himself of the subject it treats,--has shown conclusively
the admirable character of the community in which that delusion broke
out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out
for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter
where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as
in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from
such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was
not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution
in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general,"
procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three
times as many as suffered in Salem during the whole delusion"; several
persons were tried by water ordeal, and drowned, in Suffolk, Essex, and
Cambridgeshire, at the same time with the Salem executions; and capital
punishments took place there some years after the end of the trouble
here. It is well known, also, that persons were put to death for
witchcraft in two other American colonies. The excess in Salem was
heightened by a well-planned imposture, but found quick sustenance
because "the imagination, called necessarily into extraordinary action
in the absence of scientific certainty, was ... exercised in vain
attempts to discover, unassisted by observation and experiment, the
elements and first principles of nature," [Footnote: Upham, I. 382] and
"had reached a monstrous growth," nourished by a copious literature of
magic and demonology, and by the opinions of the most eminent and humane
preachers and poets.