Yet the idea of some supernatural visitation at Salem was but very slowly relinquished, being still persisted in even by those penitent actors in the scene who confessed and lamented their own delusion and blood-guiltiness. Such were Sewell, one of the judges; Noyes, one of the most active prosecutors; and several of the jurymen who had sat on the trials. The witnesses upon whose testimony so many innocent persons had suffered were never called to any account. When Calef's letters were presently published in London, together with his account of the supposed witchcraft, the book was burned in the college yard at Cambridge by order of Increase Mather. The members of the Boston North Church came out also with a pamphlet in defence of their pastors. Hale, minister of Beverly, in his _Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft_, and Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, though they admit there had been "a going too far" in the affair at Salem, are yet still as strenuous as ever for the reality of witchcraft. Nor were they without support from abroad. Dr. Watts, then one of the chief leaders of the English Dissenters, wrote to Cotton Mather, "I am persuaded there was much agency of the devil in those affairs, and perhaps there were some real witches, too." Twenty years elapsed before the heirs of the victims, and those who had been obliged to fly for their lives, obtained some partial indemnity for their pecuniary losses. Stoughton and Cotton Mather, though they never expressed the least regret or contrition for their part in the affair, still maintained their places in the public estimation. Just as the trials were concluded, Stoughton, though he held the King's commission as lieutenant-governor, was chosen a counsellor--a mark of confidence which the theocratic majority did not choose to extend to several of the moderate party named in the original appointment--and to this post he was annually reelected as long as he lived; while Moody, because he had favored the escape of some of the accused, found it necessary to resign his pastorship of the First Church of Boston, and to return again to Portsmouth. Yet we need less wonder at the pertinacity with which this delusion was adhered to, when we find Addison arguing for the reality of witchcraft at the same time that he refuses to believe in any modern instance of it; and even Blackstone, half a century after, gravely declaring that "to deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament." %ESTABLISHMENT OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND% A.D. 1694 JOHN FRANCIS