The intense strain given to the prevalent monstrous creed concerning the devil, when its requirements were vigorously enforced at Salem Village in 1692, ruptured that creed itself; and no substitute for it under which the phenomena of witchcraft could be referred to competent authors and forces had been obtained in 1767. The public formerly had believed that either One Great Devil and his sympathetic imps, or embodied human beings who had made a covenant with him, must be the authors of all mysterious malignant action upon men, because no other unseen rational agents were recognized as having access to man. All acts deemed witchcrafts, therefore, were the devil's. But belief devil-ward had changed at Hutchinson's day. The Great Devil's use of covenanted children, women, and men as his only available instrumentalities, had ceased to be asserted; the fathering of all mysterious works upon him and his had become an obsolete custom. Its revival might not meet kindly reception by the public; it probably would be distasteful to people whom tragic experience had not very long since taught to distrust and disown his Black Majesty's sway over material things, and were also chagrined that their fathers had held undoubting faith in his powers and operations over and upon things temporal and palpable. The devil had been credited with more than he performed or had power to accomplish. Reflection had brought conviction that other intermeddlers existed than purely Satanic ones. And yet the culture and science of those times were incompetent to furnish an historian with any satisfactory evidence that any intelligent actors excepting the devil and human beings acted in and upon human society. Devil or man, one or the other, according to the then existing belief, must have enacted witchcraft. Whether the devil did, had been under consideration for more than seventy years, and public judgment declared him not guilty. What, therefore, was the historian's necessity? He was forced to make embodied human beings its sole enactors. No wonder that the necessity made him petulant when facts and circumstances forced from his pen intimations that mere children and old women were competent and actual authors of some manifestations which, to his own keen and philosophic intellect, seemed "more than natural." "More than natural" in his sense they obviously were. A distinct perception that the good _God's_ disembodied children, as well as the devil's, can naturally traverse avenues earthward, and manifest their powers among men, would have enabled him to account philosophically for all the mysteries of those days. But "the fullness of time" for that had not then come. C. W. UPHAM.