Puritans and Education--Provision for Public Schools--Puritan Sincerity --Effect of Intolerance on the Community--Quakers Harshly Persecuted--The Salem Witchcraft Tragedy--History of the Delusion--Rebecca Nourse and Other Victims--The People Come to Their Senses--Cotton Mather Obdurate to the Last--Puritan Morals--Comer's Diary--Rhode Island in Colonial Times. It is to the credit of the Puritans that promptly upon their settlement in Massachusetts they made provision for education. Many of the Puritans were learned men, and some of them graduates of Cambridge in England, and when a school was established at Newtown for the education of the ministry, the name of the place was changed to Cambridge. When John Harvard endowed the school in 1638 with his library and the gift of one half his estate--about $4000, but equal to much more than that amount at the present day--the school was erected into a college and named Harvard College after the founder. The central aim and purpose of Puritan education was religious. The schools were maintained so that the children could learn to read the Bible, and also incidentally the printed fulminations of the ministers and magistrates. The Massachusetts school law of 1649 set forth in the preamble that, "it being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these later times persuading men from the use of tongues, so that at the least a true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded with false glossing of saint-seeming deceivers, and that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers," therefore, etc. Every township was required to maintain a school for reading and writing, and every town of a hundred householders a grammar-school, with a teacher qualified to fit youths for the university. This school law was enacted likewise in the other Puritan colonies. While its object was to strengthen the hold of religion, as expounded by the Puritan ministry, upon the people, its general effect was to spread intelligence along with learning, and to break down the barriers of intolerance. It is a significant fact, however, and in accordance with the lessons of more recent history, that the seat of the highest education was not always the seat of the highest intelligence. The witchcraft delusion found a haven in Harvard when the common sense of a common-school educated people rejected it by a decisive majority.