By the following year the craze had exhausted itself, and there was a general jail-delivery. Many of the children afterwards confessed to the falsity of their testimony. Samuel Sewall was one of the trial judges. He afterwards, while standing in his pew in the Old South Church at Boston, had read at the desk at public declaration expressing his deep repentance that he had been in such grievous error, and asking the congregation to unite with him in praying for the forgiveness of God. Cotton Mather, however, endeavored to vindicate himself by the statement, "I know not that ever I have advanced any opinion in the matter of witchcraft but what all the ministers of the Lord that I know of in the world, whether English or Scotch, or French or Dutch, are of the same opinion with me." Sidenote: The witchcraft delusion elsewhere in the colonies. Belief in witchcraft was not confined to Massachusetts. Evidence of this superstition--childish to us of to-day, but a stern reality in the strongest minds of Cotton Mather's time--was noticeable throughout most of the colonies until the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1705 a witch was "ducked" in Virginia. There were trials for witchcraft in Maryland during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, but there is no evidence extant of an execution. In Pennsylvania in 1683 a woman was tried as a witch, and bound to good behavior. In 1779, during a similar panic among the French creoles at Cahokia, Ill., two negro slaves were condemned to be hanged, and another to be burned alive while chained to a post, on the charge of practising sorcery; there is, however, no evidence that the sentence was carried out. 81. Political Conditions. Sidenote: Administration.