With ears competently attuned, the meek and truth-loving Burroughs was occasionally able to receive not only knowledge of the thoughts of mortals in ways unusual, but also, as we judge, to receive spiritual truths copiously from purer fountains than his cotemporaries generally could get access to; and he thence obtained such truths as relaxed in him many credal bonds which firmly held most of his cotemporary preachers to the creeds, forms, ordinances, and customs common in the churches then. Many questions put to him at his trial were, obviously, designed to draw forth evidence of his lax regard for and inattention to the accepted ordinances of religion. He admitted both that it was long since he had sat at the communion table, and that some of his own children had not been baptized. We presume that he was inwardly, wisely, and beneficently prompted to walk somewhat astray from the narrow and soul-cramping paths then trod by most New England clergymen. The spirit of the Lord was giving him more liberty than most of his cotemporaries felt privileged to exercise. Using his greater facilities than theirs for instruction in heavenly things, he probably advanced far beyond his brethren generally in sinking the _letter_, that is, sinking the forms, and ceremonies, and ordinances of religion beneath its divine spirit, and his less illumined brethren suspected him of an abandonment of religion itself, and of alliance with the great enemy of all goodness. Some among them apparently looked upon him as a combined heretic and wizard, withheld all sympathy from, and exulted over the doom of, this double culprit. But this victim may have been, and probably was, as high above most of his crucifiers as freedom is above bondage, as the spirit above the letter, as light above darkness, as sincerity above hypocrisy. The blood of such as Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Mary Easty, GEORGE BURROUGHS, and probably many others who in company with these took their exit from life shrouded in witchcraft's blackening mists, may go far toward making Gallows Hill a Mount Calvary--a spot on which zeal urged on the worse to crucify their betters in true godliness--betters in all that fits immortal souls for gladdening welcome into realms above. SUMMARY. 1648. MARGARET JONES manifested startling efficacy of hands and medicines, consternating keenness of perceptives, predictions subsequently verified, and the presence of a vanishing child. Such was her witchcraft; and for this she was executed. 1656. ANN HIBBINS comprehended conversation between persons too distant from her to be heard normally, ... and was hanged. 1662. ANN COLE had her form possessed and spoken through by either the devil or other disembodied ones, and by them made both to express thoughts that never were in her mind, and to further the conviction and execution of the Greensmiths.