Sir William Phips, the Governor just arrived,[39] seems to have given in to the prevailing opinion. He was much under the direction of the spiritual fathers of the country. Mr. Stoughton, the Lieut. Governor, and at the head of the Court[40] for trial of the witches, and who had great influence upon the rest of the judges, had taken up this notion that, although the Devil might appear in the shape of a guilty person, yet he would never be permitted to assume the shape of an innocent person.[41] This opinion, at first, was generally received and would not bear to be contradicted. Some of the most religious women who were accused, when they saw the appearance of distress and torture in the girls, and heard their solemn declarations that they saw the shapes or specters of the accused afflicting them, persuaded themselves they were witches, and that the Devil, somehow or other, though they could not remember when, had taken possession of their evil hearts, and obtained some sort of assent to his afflicting in their shapes; and thereupon they confessed themselves to be guilty. Even to this day, the country seems rather to be divided in opinion whether it was the accused or the afflicted who were under some preternatural or diabolical possession, than whether the afflicted were under bodily distempers, or altogether guilty of fraud and imposture. The trial of Richard Hatheway,[42] before Lord Chief Justice Holt, opened the eyes of all except the lowest part of the people in England; and an act of Parliament in his late Majesty’s reign[43] will prevent the prejudice which remains in them from the mischiefs it used to produce on juries in judicial proceedings. It is a great pity the like examples of conviction and punishment had not been made here. I hope an impartial narrative of the supposed witchcrafts at Salem will convince the New-England reader that there was no thing preternatural in the whole affair; but all proceeded from the most amazing wickedness of the accusers. In February, 1691 [-2], a daughter and a niece of Mr. Parris,[44] the minister of Salem village, girls of ten or eleven years of age, and one or two more girls in the neighborhood, made the same sort of complaints as Goodwin’s children had done two or three [four] years before. The physicians, having no other way of accounting for the disorder, pronounced them bewitched. An Indian woman who lived with the minister, with her husband,[45] tried an experiment to find out the witch. This coming to the children’s knowledge, they cried out upon the Indian woman as appearing to them, pinching, pricking and tormenting them, and fell into fits, became convulsed, distorted, &c.