Wherever the responsibility at Salem may have rested, the truth is that in the general fear and panic there was potent in the minds, both of the clergy and the laity, the spirit of fanaticism and malevolence in some instances, such as misled the pastor of the First Church to point to the corpses of Giles Corey's devoted and saintly wife and others swinging to and fro, and say "What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there." This conspectus of witchcraft, old and new, of its development from the sorcery and magic of the ancients into the mediæval theological dogma of the power of Satan, of its gradual ripening into an epidemic demonopathy, of its slow growth in the American colonies, of its volcanic outburst in the close of the seventeenth century, is relevant and appropriate to this account of the delusion in Connecticut, its rise and suppression, its firm hold on the minds and consciences of the colonial leaders for threescore years after the settlement of the towns, a chapter in Connecticut history written in the presence of the actual facts now made known and available, and with a purpose of historic accuracy. CHAPTER V "It was not to be expected of the colonists of New England that they should be the first to see through a delusion which befooled the whole civilized world, and the gravest and most knowing persons in it. The colonists in Connecticut and New Haven, as well as in Massachusetts, like all other Christian people at that time--at least with extremely rare individual exceptions--believed in the reality of a hideous crime called witchcraft." PALFREY'S _New England_ (Vol. IV, pp. 96-127). "The truth is that it [witchcraft] pervaded the whole Christian Church. The law makers and the ministers of New England were under its influences as--and no more than--were the law makers and ministers of Old England." _Blue Laws--True and False_ (p. 23), TRUMBULL. "One ---- of Windsor Arraigned and Executed at Hartford for a Witch." WINTHROP'S _Journal_ (2: 374, Savage Ed., 1853). Here beginneth the first chapter of the story of the delusion in Connecticut. It is an entry made by John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in his famous journal, without specific date, but probably in the spring of 1647. It is of little consequence save as much has been made of it by some writers as fixing the relative date of the earliest execution for witchcraft in New England, and locating it in one of the three original Connecticut towns. What matters it at this day whether Mary Johnson as tradition runs, or Alse Youngs as truth has it, was put to death for witchcraft in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1647, or Martha Jones of Charlestown, Massachusetts, was hung for the same crime at Boston in 1648, as also set down in Winthrop's Journal?