On the next Sunday there was a scene in the church, the record of which
was afterward annotated by the church members in a spirit of grief and
humiliation. After sacrament the elders propounded to the church, and
the congregation unanimously agreed, that Sister Nurse, being convicted
as a witch by the court, should be excommunicated in the afternoon of
the same day. The place was thronged; the reverend elders were in the
pulpit; the deacons presided below; the sheriff and his officers brought
in the witch, and led her up the broad aisle, her chains clanking as she
moved. As she stood in the middle of the aisle, the Reverend Mr. Noyes
pronounced her sentence of expulsion from the Church on earth, and from
all hope of salvation hereafter. As she had given her soul to Satan,
she was delivered over to him for ever. She was aware that every
eye regarded her with horror and hate, unapproached under any other
circumstances; but it appears that she was able to sustain it. She was
still calm and at peace on that day, and during the fortnight of final
waiting. When the time came, she traversed the streets of Salem between
houses in which she had been an honored guest, and surrounded by
well-known faces; and then there was the hard task, for her aged limbs,
of climbing the rocky and steep path on Witches' Hill to the place where
the gibbets stood in a row, and the hangman was waiting for her, and for
Sarah Good, and several more of whom Salem chose to be rid that day. It
was the 19th of July, 1692. The bodies were put out of the way on the
hill, like so many dead dogs; but this one did not remain there long.
By pious hands it was--nobody knew when--brought home to the domestic
cemetery, where the next generation pointed out the grave, next to her
husband's, and surrounded by those of her children. As for her repute,
Hutchinson, the historian, tells us that even excommunication could not
permanently disgrace her. "Her life and conversation had been such,
that the remembrance thereof, in a short time after, wiped off all the
reproach occasioned by the civil or ecclesiastical sentence against
her." (Vol. ii. p. 292.)
[Great God! and is this the road our ancestors had to travel in their
pilgrimage in quest of freedom and Christianity? Are these the fruits of
the misunderstood doctrine of total depravity?]
Thus much comfort her husband had till he died in 1695. In a little
while none of his eight children remained unmarried, and he wound up
his affairs. He gave over the homestead to his son Samuel, and divided
all he had among the others, reserving only a mare and her saddle, some
favorite articles of furniture, and £14 a year, with a right to call on
his children for any further amount that might be needful. He made no
will, and his children made no difficulties, but tended his latter days,
and laid him in his own ground, when at seventy-seven years old he died.
In 1711, the authorities of the Province, sanctioned by the Council
of Queen Anne, proposed such reparation as their heart and conscience
suggested. They made a grant to the representatives of Rebecca Nurse of
£25! In the following year something better was done, on the petition of
the son Samuel who inhabited the homestead. A church meeting was called;
the facts of the excommunication of twenty years before were recited,
and a reversal was proposed, "the General Court having taken off the
attainder, and the testimony on which she was convicted being not now so
satisfactory to ourselves and others as it was generally in that hour
of darkness and temptation." The remorseful congregation blotted out
the record in the church book, "humbly requesting that the merciful God
would pardon whatsoever sin, error, or mistake was in the application of
that censure, and of the whole affair, through our merciful High Priest,
who knoweth how to have compassion on the ignorant, and those that are
out of the way." (Vol. ii. p. 483.)