When the delusion revived in Massachusetts it was with increased force and virulence. Its recrudescence may be directly traced to the publication and general circulation in the colony of a book by Increase Mather, entitled “An Essay for the recording of Illustrious Providences,” etc., which contained a detailed account of all the marvels that Divine benevolence or wrath had wrought in the last thirty or forty years.[72] At about the same time appeared the account of the trials in England under Sir Matthew Hale[73] and of the remarkable mania which had raged in Sweden in 1669.[74] These horrible stories became the subject of conversation, of meditation in private, and of sermon and prayer in public. They were apparently read or related to the young as edifying and instructive literature; for, from this time forward, children in New England began to repeat the phenomena that had prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic. The colony was in a very excited and discontented condition. The beloved patent upon which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been so boldly reared had been taken away from them, and they had been brought under the government of England. Their “purity of doctrine” was more than threatened, as not only had they been compelled to desist from persecuting Quakers, but they had also been constrained to allow the hated _Book of Common Prayer_ to be read in public, and to permit men to worship God according to its rubrical provisions. More than this, the king’s governor had actually polluted one of their meeting-houses by using it for the performance of the services of the national church. It seemed indeed to many of the men who were now prominent in the room of their wiser fathers, that Satan was making a desperate attack upon the colony; and their minds were predisposed to believe any marvels the result of diabolical agency.