But it is not for the sake of lauding their penitential exercises that I lay stress upon the unexampled character of our forefathers’ action. There is another aspect from which the outcome of the Salem trials ought to be regarded. They fell at a critical moment, when witchcraft was, for whatever reason, soon to become a crime unknown to the English courts. They attracted attention instantly in the Mother Country.[169] Can there be any question that the sensational recovery of the Province from its attack of prosecuting zeal, accompanied as that recovery was by retraction and by utterances of deep contrition, had a profound effect in England? The mere dropping of the prosecution would not have had this effect. In 1597, James I., alarmed at the extent to which witch trials were going in Scotland, revoked all the existing special commissions that were engaged in holding trials for this offence.[170] But the evil was soon worse than ever. What was efficacious in the New England instance was the unheard-of action of judge and jury in recanting. This made the Salem troubles the best argument conceivable in the hands of those reformers who, soon after 1700, began to make actual headway in their opposition to the witch dogma. I am not reasoning _a priori_. By common consent one of the most effective arraignments of the superstition that we are discussing is the Historical Essay on Witchcraft of Dr. Francis Hutchinson, which appeared in 1718.[171] Now Hutchinson, who gives much space to the New England trials, refers to Sewall’s action, and prints the recantation of the jurors in full. Nor does he leave in us doubt as to the purpose for which he adduces these testimonies. “And those Towns,” he writes, “having regained their Quiet; and this Case being of that Nature, that Facts and Experience are of more weight than meer rational Arguments; it will be worth our while to observe some Passages that happened after this Storm, when they had Time to look back on what had passed.”[172] Whatever may be thought of these considerations, one fact cannot be assailed. In prosecuting witches, our forefathers acted like other men in the seventeenth century. In repenting and making public confession, they acted like themselves. Their fault was the fault of their time; their merit is their own.