It is hard to decide how much of all this was panic and how much deliberate fraud and imposture. There is no reason to suspect anything worse than pure superstition in the early cases in Massachusetts and Connecticut; but the marvellous attacks of the Goodwin children in Boston and of the Parris girls in Salem seem to belong to a different category.[98] It is almost incredible that the girl who played so cleverly upon the vanity and the theological prejudices of Cotton Mather was not fully aware of what she was doing; and the fact that the Parris children accused persons with whom their father had previously had trouble, renders their delusion extremely suspicious. The great St. Benedict is reported to have cured a brother who was possessed by the devil by thrashing him soundly; and it is much to be regretted that the Protestantism of the New Englanders prevented their knowing and experimenting with the saint’s specific, which, in all ages of the world, has been admitted to be wonderfully efficacious. It has been held by many that the testimony at Salem was deliberately fabricated; Hutchinson, writing at a time when men who could remember the trials were yet living, is strongly of that opinion. The case does not, however, seem as clear as that of the Goodwins; and of them Hutchinson, as has been said, reports that they were estimable women who had never acknowledged any deception on their part. The phenomena of mental disease are so strange and complicated that at the present day men are not as ready to set everything down to fraud as they were a hundred years ago. It is possible to account psychologically for all the phenomena recorded, without being obliged to adopt any very violent hypothesis. Even if at the outset the children in either case were pretending, it is quite as conceivable that they should have passed from pretence of nervous symptoms to the reality, as it is to think that absolute fraud would pass so long undetected. The symptoms described are such as would be recognized by any alienist to-day, and could be duplicated out of the current medical journals. It may also be noticed that many of the possessed were girls just coming to maturity, and thus of an age when the nervous system was passing through a period of strain.