Yet Thomas Wright--never to be mentioned without honor--speaks of the New England troubles as “exemplifying the horrors and the absurdities of the witchcraft persecutions more than anything that had occurred in the old world,”[131] and Dr. G. H. Moore,--in an important article on The Bibliography of Witchcraft in Massachusetts--declares that the Salem outbreak “was the _epitome_ of witchcraft! whose ghastly records may be challenged to produce any parallel for it in the world’s history!”[132] In further refutation of such reckless statements I need add but a single instance. In 1596 there was an outbreak of some pestilence or other in Aberdeen. The populace ascribed the disease to the machinations of a family long suspected of witchcraft. A special commission was appointed by the Privy Council, “and before April 1597, twenty-three women and one man had been burnt, one woman had died under the torture, one had hanged herself in prison, and four others who were acquitted on the capital charge, were yet branded on the cheek and banished from the sheriffdom.”[133] There was a very special reason why troubles with the powers of darkness were to be expected in New England--a reason which does not hold good for Great Britain or, indeed, for any part of Western Europe. I refer, of course, to the presence of a considerable heathen population--the Indians. These were universally supposed to be devil-worshippers--not only by the Colonists but by all the rest of the world--for paganism was held to be nothing but Satanism.[134] Cotton Mather and the Jesuit fathers of Canada were at one on this point.[135] The religious ceremonies of the Indians were, as we know, in large part an invocation of spirits, and their powwows, or medicine men, supposed themselves to be wizards,--_were_ wizards, indeed, so far as sorcery is possible.[136] The Colonial government showed itself singularly moderate, however, in its attitude toward Indian practices of a magical character. Powwowing was, of course, forbidden wherever the jurisdiction of the white men held sway, but it was punishable by fine only, nor was there any idea of inflicting the extreme penalty[137]--although the offence undoubtedly came under the Mosaic law, so often quoted on the title-pages of books on witchcraft, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”