Did he intend to say that credulity caused the senses of our fathers to see, hear, and feel erroneously, so that they would testify less accurately than those of the generation in which he was living? Perhaps he did; and yet on what rational grounds could he? None that we perceive. Was the former generation less truthful than his own? Probably not. Had it less sagacity than his own? We can think of no evidence that it had. Were its senses less reliable? Probably not. Was its belief in the testimony of its own senses a proof of its _credulity_? No. Was clear statement of what its senses had witnessed evidence of its credulity? It seems to have been so to the historian, but is not to us. The fathers told of witnessing things, which, if they occurred, were seemingly "more than natural." What then? Does that prove that the things they described did not occur, and thus prove a generation of the fathers to have been, as a whole, either dolts or liars? No. The appearance is, that the historian was obliged to admit that valid testimony to occurrence of facts around the Goodwin children, which seemed more than natural, must be conceded; and yet he could not account for the facts; he was mentally baffled, non-plussed, and could only say, "It was a time of great credulity." That explains nothing, while it tempts us to suspect its author of such credulity in his own penetration, that he apprehended that a whole line of ancestry through successive generations had been fatuous and exaggerative, since it continuously described and swore to occurrences which conflicted with his own theoretical limits to things credible. A credulity which caused him to regard himself a better knower and judge of what actually transpired in preceding ages, than were the very persons who lived in that past, and were eye and ear witnesses of what then occurred, impelled the pen of this witchcraft historian to ascribe the marvels of other days to causes or to conditions absolutely incompetent to produce them.