We can extend much leniency to Hutchinson, because he lived and wrote when the pendulum of belief, recently wrenched from the disturbing grasp of witchcraft, and allowed to swing back toward extreme Sadduceeism, had not acquired its legitimate movements under the action of mesmerism, Spiritualism, psychology, and other regulating forces. Witchcraft's unnatural devil had died from the blow he received at Salem Village in 1692, and for a long time afterward there was seeming non-intercourse between men and dwellers in spirit realms; partially man was forgetting that there are spirits, and doubting whether they had ever acted overtly among men. Probably Hutchinson's thoughts were never led to inquire whether the forces and realms of nature may not extend far above, below, and around the confines of palpable matter,--extend beyond where man's external senses take cognizance,--or where his natural science has penetrated. His thoughts, perhaps, were never led to inquire whether there exists natural provision for mesmeric and varied psychological operations, nor to inquire whether, under possible fitting conditions, unseen intelligences could possess and control certain peculiar physical human forms. Lacking not only knowledge, but also circumstances which would naturally generate any conjecture that both good spirits and bad alike might sometimes come to earth in freedom, and work wonders on its external surface and among its living inhabitants, Hutchinson, cornered and baffled in search for an adequate cause for facts which he felt called upon to state, could only credulously say, in _quasi_ explanation of them, "_It was a time of great credulity_"! His implied position that all the works were nothing more than natural acts and sufferings of children, magnified and made formidable by popular credulity, fails to yield satisfactory revealment of the nature and origin of such facts as he himself presents and leaves uncontroverted.