The rapidity with which the panic spread was most remarkable, and it is painful to notice the abject terror into which the population was thrown. Parents accused their children, and children their parents, and, in one case at least, a wife her husband. Some men were tied neck and heels until they would confess and accuse others.[99] It was a period of the most pitiful mental and spiritual cowardice, and those that were most directly responsible for the shameful condition of affairs were men who, from their learning and their position, should have been the leaders and sustainers of the popular conscience in soberness of mind and charity. But the ministers of New England had emphasized the necessity of a belief in witchcraft as a part of the Divine revelation. The Old Testament spoke of witches, and had said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” while the New Testament supplied the idea of diabolical possession; hence they argued, with a style of argument not yet disused, that any one who denied the existence of witchcraft was a Sadducee and an impugner of the truth of God’s Word. Soon the reasoning was extended to prove that any one who denied that the particular phenomena under discussion were caused by witchcraft was an enemy of religion. The ministers, as has been said, have an unenviable prominence in the accounts of this disastrous delusion. They were as forward in destroying the witches as their predecessors had been in persecuting the Quakers. They hounded on the judges and juries in their bloody work, they increased the popular excitement by their public fasts and prayers and sermons, they insulted the victims on the scaffold. It is no wonder that, under such leadership, the population was excited to madness. It was only when they found their own families and friends accused by those on whose testimony others as innocent had been destroyed, that they were able to recognize that the accusations were absurd and the evidence worthless. Yet it may be said on their behalf that they were not really as far in advance of the majority of their contemporaries as they imagined they were, and it is to their credit that, when their eyes were opened, they were opened thoroughly and not closed again. Cases of witchcraft now disappeared from New England, while in other lands, where there was the same sombre Calvinism but less enlightenment, as in Scotland, the delusion continued for many years.[100]