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 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 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 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 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. |