With facts like these in view, we can hardly regard it as an accident that the Salem witchcraft marks a time when the Colony was just emerging from a political struggle that had threatened its very existence. For several years men’s minds had been on the rack. The nervous condition of public feeling is wonderfully well depicted in a letter written in 1688 by the Rev. Joshua Moodey in Boston to Increase Mather, then in London as agent of the Colony. The Colonists are much pleased by the favor with which Mather has been received, but they distrust court promises. They are alarmed by a report that Mather and his associates have suffered “a great slurr” on account of certain over-zealous actions. Moodey rejoices in the death of Robert Mason, “one of the worst enemies that you & I & Mr. Morton had in these parts.” Then there are the Indians:--“The cloud looks very dark and black upon us, & wee are under very awfull circumstances, which render an Indian Warr terrible to us.” The Colonists shudder at a rumor that John Palmer, one of Andros’s Council, is to come over as Supreme Judge, and know not how to reconcile it with the news of the progress their affairs have been making with the King. And finally, the writer gives an account of the case of Goodwin’s afflicted children, which, as we know, was a kind of prologue to the Salem outbreak:--“Wee have a very strange th[ing] among us, which we know not what to make of, except it bee Witchcraft, as we think it must needs bee.”[207] Clearly, there would have been small fear, in 1692, of a plot on Satan’s part to destroy the Province, if our forefathers had not recently encountered other dangers of a more tangible kind. * * * * * In conclusion, I may venture to sum up, in the form of a number of brief theses, the main results at which we appear to have arrived in our discussion of witchcraft:-- 1. The belief in witchcraft is the common heritage of humanity. It is not chargeable to any particular time, or race, or form of religion. 2. Witchcraft in some shape or other is still credited by a majority of the human race. 3. The belief in witchcraft was practically universal in the seventeenth century, even among the educated; with the mass of the people it was absolutely universal. 4. To believe in witchcraft in the seventeenth century was no more discreditable to a man’s head or heart than it was to believe in spontaneous generation or to be ignorant of the germ theory of disease. 5. The position of the seventeenth century believers in witchcraft was logically and theologically stronger than that of the few persons who rejected the current belief. 6. The impulse to put a witch to death comes from the instinct of self-preservation. It is no more cruel or otherwise blameworthy, in itself, than the impulse to put a murderer to death.