What personality or persons, and of what rank in the scale of being, was
or were primal and chief in originating and enacting the famous Salem
Tragedy? If, as the generation then living believed, it was a specially
great controller and commander of all invisible foes to God, Christ, and
Christians everywhere, and who, having been effectually baffled in Europe,
resolved to keep America from passing into the control of his enemies,
God and Christ, and to thoroughly banish the hated intruders from these
his more exclusive and prized domains; if it was that being, his strategy
seemingly was to "beard the lion in his den," to make bold and fierce
attack on one of the strongest fortresses of Christians, presuming that
capture of such a post would lead to easy expulsion of all trespassers
from the whole of his broad lands on this side the Atlantic. His apparent
policy, judged of by the place and circumstances of attack, was to subdue
the strongest first, and thus so intimidate as to frighten all others back
to their former homes or the homes of their fathers. But _such_ a devil
was not there. Many beliefs prevalent two centuries ago are now obsolete.
Such a devil as witchcraft was imputed to, and who was believed to put
forth greater power over all Indian and heathen lands than God exercised
there, receives cognition in few brains to-day. Nevertheless, faith in the
presence, power, and malignity of such a being, present and at work among
them, was the main force that enabled his contestants to unwittingly put
an end to faith in the existence of any one special foe to all goodness,
whose power and dominion over the earth and its inhabitants very nearly
rivaled those of the Omnipotent One, and whose malice was a near
counterpoise to complete supernal benevolence.
Reason demands that the creature shall be inferior to its creator, that
devil shall be less than God; and she in most persons refers all things
and all events, in the ultimate analysis of causes and agents, back to One
Great Over-Soul--one God.
If an all-wise and omnipotent One, being full of mercy too, proposed to
subject an erroneous and enslaving human creed to a strain which should
shatter it past restoration to strength, and thus to set its subjected
holders free, highest wisdom may have seen that bright intellect, true
courage, firm nerves, unfaltering devotion to sense of duty, and strong
faith heavenward, were needful instrumentalities for best accomplishment
of the design. The abode of people than whom none elsewhere were better
prepared, more able, or more willing to fight the devil himself promptly,
unfalteringly, and persistently, may have been a spot where supernal
prescience saw that men, as blinded instruments, could best be made to
effect their own and the world's emancipation from a time-hardened and
disastrous public error. The mental and moral strength, and other good
_fighting_ qualities of its occupants generally, may have caused the
Village to be fixed upon as the most favorable battle-ground available for
the projected struggle.
Neither God nor the devil, however, was author in any sense pertinent to
the present inquiry. Our _ifs_, and the sentences which follow them,
cannot meet the demands nor the needs of modern readers. Faith, in direct
personal action upon either individual human beings or communities and
nations by any incomprehensibly vast and ubiquitous intelligent being
either malignant or benevolent, is not as prevalent now as it was in many
generations past. God, or a mighty devil either, as constant, immediate,
and personal performer on humanity's stage of operations, is not
extensively recognized by the deep thinkers of our age.
Indeed, modern thought has come very low down in its search for
witchcraft's author. Turning from God and the devil, the reputed workers
of great marvels in ages long past, our interpreters of America's earlier
wonders have fancied that they find the former existence of little girls
whose powers to sway the human mind and agitate a land, so approximated
those of omnipotence, and whose malignities so perceptibly equaled his of
Cloven Hoof, that they of their own wills concocted and enacted scenes of
simulated pains, distortions, losses of sight, hearing, and speech; and
also mimicked the movements of birds and beasts, and performed such
impositions and tricks innumerable as made their homes and neighborhood a
horrid pandemonium; in doing which they manifested such prodigious power,
skill, and perfect acting, that these little untaught and untrained ones
outled in skill, all the world's most expert tricksters, and, in
malignity, the most devilish human monsters our world ever contained, in
any age or land.
Somewhere between the extremes of strength and weakness, of benevolence
and malignity, we perhaps can find beings more likely to have directly
produced the marvels in question than either God, devil, or little girls.
Consciousness and experience indicate to most persons that an
all-dominating power exists, and bounds and hedges in the spheres of
freedom and ability which are occupied by finite beings. Something above
and beyond all finites says to each of them, "Thus far, but no farther,
canst thou go." Within spheres thus limited there abide many grades of
intelligent and affectional beings, ranging in differences of powers and
dispositions as widely as any mortal's thoughts can conceive. Vast,
countless hosts of intelligences, though vailed from our outer vision, may
be, and evidences are very strong that such ever are abiding dwellers
above, below, around, and in the midst of earth's corporeal inhabitants.
Within their unperceived abodes such ones may actuate the forces which
evolve many less marked events, as well as all special providences,
special judgments--miracles so called, and such marvels generally as were
formerly imputed to either God or the devil as _immediate_ author. We have
no faith that either of the two had any closer or more special connection
with witchcraft matters than with the ordinary doings of man.
The undefinable source of all things which are contained in the vast
creation, emitted all forth subject to laws, and surrounded and
infiltrated by forces which enable the world's progressing inhabitants,
visible and invisible, to purchase, through study, toil, absorptions from
enfolding auras, and other furnished helps, both knowledge and powers just
as fast and great as their advancements and growing needs from time to
time call for more light and for augmented powers.
Finite beings naturally gravitate to where every instrumentality needful
to their highest well-being can be obtained by the co-operative efforts
and aspirations of finites, seen and unseen, for learning laws and
manipulating forces which pervade their places of residence. Generations
upon generations, whose mortal forms long centuries ago moldered away, may
still be active laborers in and about the men of to-day, and may be, and
may always have been, the immediate manifesters of all supernal
intelligence and marvelous force issuing from regions which the eye of
flesh lacks power to scan. One of the old prophets of a prior generation
made known to John the Revelator what he recorded; and agents of like
nature, that is, departed human spirits, may have been the only revealers
of supernal truths, facts, and visions to man, and the only workers of the
signs or extra-marvelous manifestations of force and knowledge which have
been deemed credentials from the Omniscient and Omnipotent. We believe in
God and in the issuance of knowledge and force from him to man, but have
not faith in his immediate personal putting forth of either, in
accomplishment of such events as are often called special providences.
Such events occur--they often come both uncalled for and in response to
prayer--to yearnings "uttered or unexpressed;" but the prayers and
yearnings reach, stimulate, and help both ambient forces and ascended
spirits to let in or to confer the needed protection or restoration. The
air all around us is alive with hearers of prayer, and no humble and
fervent aspiration for help to come forth from the mystic abodes of
spiritual beings and occult forces ever fails to bring aid and elevation.
The purer and humbler the aspiration, the nearer does it penetrate toward
the Great Source of being, life, and bliss, and the more powerful and
beneficent are those whose responses and emanations can reach and aid the
petitioner.
The same forces and laws which permit the sensible action of good spirits
among men, just as freely and extensively permit the presence and action
of malicious ones. God aids the good and restrains the wicked just as much
and no more on the other side of the grave than on this. Freedom, whether
to comply with or to contend against either natural or moral law, is as
great in spirit spheres as in our midst on earth. Any spirit, either
benevolent or malignant, is as free to use the forces and laws which
permit spirit manifestations, as any navigator is, be he morally good or
bad, to avail himself of winds, currents, tides, and the like, for passing
over seas to a land not his own, and acting out his characteristic
purposes there.
Our position, fortified by the facts and reasonings in the preceding
pages, is, that spirits--departed human beings--generated and outwrought
Salem witchcraft. That is our answer to the question of its authorship.