Parris, the minister, thought it necessary to preach a sermon fortifying the belief in witchcraft, and when Sarah Cloyse, a sister of Rebecca, got up and went out of the meeting-house, regarding the sermon as an insult to the memory of her murdered sister, she was also denounced and arrested. The Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather, one of the lights of Puritanism, and son of Dr. Increase Mather, president of Harvard University, was most active and violent in the prosecutions. Among the victims was the Rev. Stephen Burroughs, a learned minister of exemplary life, who was accused of possessing a witch's trumpet. Mather witnessed the hanging of Burroughs, and when the latter on the scaffold offered up a touching prayer, Mather cried out to the people that Satan often transformed himself into an angel of light to deceive men's souls. The Rev. Mr. Noyes, standing by at the execution of eight accused persons, exclaimed: "What a sad thing it is to see eight fire-brands of hell hanging there!" A committee was appointed to ferret out witches, and children were readily found to court the notoriety and interest which a share in the work attracted. When the accusers began to utter charges against the wife of Governor Phipps and relatives of the Mathers, the authorities took a different view of the monster which they had evolved out of their superstitious imaginings. Public opinion, which had been fettered by fear and amazement at the hideous proceedings, began to find expression in protest against any further sacrifice. Many of the accusers recanted their testimony, and said that they had given it in order to save their own lives, dreading to be accused of witchcraft themselves. The General Court of Massachusetts appointed a general fast and supplication "that God would pardon all the errors of His servants and people in a late tragedy raised among them by Satan and his instruments." Judge Sewall, who had presided at a number of the trials, stood up in his place in the church and begged the people to pray that the errors which he had committed "might not be visited by the judgment of an avenging God on his country, his family and himself." The Rev. Mr. Parris was compelled to leave the country. Cotton Mather, however, adhered steadfastly to his belief in witches. He said, among other things equally astounding to the common sense even of that day, that the devil allowed the victims of witchcraft to "read Quaker books, the Common Prayer and popish books," but not the Bible. At the instance of Cotton Mather, and that of his father, Increase Mather, the president of Harvard, a circular was sent out signed by Increase Mather and a number of other ministers in the name of Harvard College, inviting reports of "apparitions, possessions, enchantments and all extraordinary things wherein the existence and agency of the invisible world is more sensibly demonstrated," to be used "as some fit assembly of ministers might direct." But few replies to the circular were received.