Whilst the tragedy was acting, there were but few people who doubted the hand of the Devil, and fewer that dared to own their doubts. When the Commissioners went through the town of Boston on their journey to Salem, they stopped at the house of Col. Hutchinson,[32] one of the council, who advised them, before they began any trial, to see if they could not whip the Devil out of the afflicted; but this advice was rejected. Many of the ministers of the country, who were much consulted in this affair, had a confirmed opinion of a very familiar intercourse between the visible and invisible worlds. This, together with the books which had been brought into the country not long before, containing relations of the like things in England, rendered the minds of the people in general susceptible of credit to every the like story related here. The works of Perkins[33] and other non-conformist divines were in the hands of many, and there is no doubt that Goodwin’s children had read or heard the stories in Glanvil,[34] having very exactly imitated them. Indeed all the examinations at Salem have, in almost all the circumstances, the like to match them in the account given to the world a little while before by this relator. This conformity, instead of rendering the afflicted suspected, was urged in confirmation of the truth of their stories, the Old-England demons and the New-, being so near alike. Nobody thought a parcel of young girls could have so much of the Devil in them as to combine together in an attempt to take away the lives of such a multitude of people as were accused by them. The authorities of Keble,[35] Dalton,[36] and other lawyers of note, who lay down rules of conviction as absurd as any ever adopted in New-England, gave a color to the courts and juries in their proceedings, though no authority had so great weight as that of Sir Matthew Hale,[37] reverenced in the country for his gravity and piety, and his favorable opinion of the old Puritanism, as much as for his knowledge in the law. The trials of the witches in Suffolk had been published not long before.[38] The evidence here was of the same sort with what had been judged sufficient to hang people there. Reproach then for hanging witches, although it has been often cast upon the people of New-England by those of Old-, yet it must have been done with an ill grace. We had their best authority to justify us; besides the prejudices of education [and] disposition from thence to give a serious, solemn construction to even common events in Providence, might be urged as an excuse here in some measure; but in England this was an age of as great gaiety as any age whatever, and of as great infidelity in general as any which preceded it.