Part 8

"One day I sent a boy out to hang up the brushes, &c.... He was out about five minutes. After he had taken his seat, three raps came on the door of the room where the brushes were hung. He said, 'Miss Perkins, can I go out and see who's there?' I told him, 'Yes, and leave the school-room door open.' He did so, and when he opened the brush-room door (I sat where I could see all) every one of the brushes, both long and short handled, came falling off the nails where they were hung; some struck him on the shoulders, and the broom directly on the top of his head. The dust-pan, hanging on a nail at some distance above the brushes, came tumbling to the floor with a vengeance. It then stood on its handle, then on the bottom edge, and continued on so till it entered the school-room, and then it was placed as nicely against the partition as if I had done it myself. Just as soon as I'd raise the ventilator, a black ball, like a cannon ball, would begin to roll around the attic, and make such a noise I would be obliged to lower the ventilator. One day the room was quiet as it possibly could be, and all at once some one in the attic called out, 'Dadie Pike!' Dadie thought I spoke, and said, 'What'm?' I said to him, 'Can you say your lesson?'

"Since the boy affair took place, the attic has been fastened up; locks and keys are of no use, however, for there is as much walking up stairs, and sometimes the hammering and nailing. Once in a while, sounds as of some one walking will come down the attic way, go across the entry, and open the outside door, and be gone perhaps ten minutes; after it is quiet again, the door will open, and he, she, or it will go up stairs.... I am not a spiritualist; never attended a sitting, in fact, never had anything to do with a person of that belief, and never saw any manifestations. Why anything of the sort should take place where I am, is more than I can account for."

This case, wherein a teacher and her two score pupils simultaneously saw a spirit in broad daylight, day after day and week after week, argues very forcibly that "the nature of things" permits admission that the testimony relating to the spirit child in the jail may be literally true. Laws and forces are now frequently indicating their existence, which permit the observable presence of spirits.

Intense yearnings for comfortings, sympathy, and support in her dark and trying hour, as well as other causes, may have drawn an angel child--her own or some other--to the arms of Margaret Jones, whose history reveals her possession of peculiar susceptibilities and mediumistic properties; and with her as a reservoir, materialization of the spirit may have been accomplished.

7. The sickened maid "was cured by the said Margaret, who used means to be employed to that end." Kindness and skill successfully put forth to heal the sick, even while the public was keeping her in a felon's cell, hang as a luminous cloud over her head, and betoken something good in her--betoken the possible source of something different from a malignant touch--yes, of "genuinely successful medical practice."

We know little of her character; there is no impeachment of it in the recorded testimony. Her peculiar powers resulted, no doubt, from peculiar innate formations of and connections between her outer and inner organisms, and had little dependence upon intellectual or moral qualities. Not her own holiness, nor any other common power of hers, enabled her to either intensify or abate painful sensations. Whether sinner or saint was the more prominent in her character, our course and views have no occasion to inquire.

Winthrop's comments say that "her behavior at her trial was very intemperate; lying notoriously and railing upon the jury and witnesses;... in the like distemper she died." He gives no particulars, and therefore furnishes no grounds on which we may judge whether any of her statements which seemed to him false, might not seem to us, at our different stand-point of observation, to have been true. Very many perfectly true utterances made by mediums to-day relative to their involuntary and even unconscious putting forth of acts and words imputed to them, would be deemed lies by all common interpreters who are ignorant of the part often performed by or through that higher set of mental powers which our leading scientists have lately discovered are at the service of intellect not our own. Perhaps she lied; perhaps, too, she was truthful, but misunderstood. Intemperance in her behavior, no doubt, was manifest. But that might spring from various motives. Any spirited person, consciously innocent of a charged offense, and possessing only moderate power of self-control and moderate intellectual stamina, would be very likely to pour forth warm language, and flat and forceful denials of allegations of wrong-doing. Persecuted innocence was only a very little less likely--if at all less--than ill temper or "distemper," to call forth what might seem to be "railing upon the jury and witnesses." Neither severe language nor "intemperate behavior" is necessarily derogatory to any one's prevailing temper or character, when rushing forth from the lips and limbs of one whose deeds are being so misinterpreted that beneficence is looked upon as diabolism, and whose beneficent works are being made to draw down upon their author an ignominious death.

Possibly words from her lips, and behavior seemingly prompted by her emotions, were manifestations of the thoughts and impulses of some other intelligence than herself. If so, most scathing rebukes for her persecution, and for thirstings for her blood, might fall thick and heavy upon the ears of benighted jurors and blinded witnesses. Observation has often noticed most terrific outflowings of denunciations upon blind guides, through organs of speech not controlled by their reputed owner. Felix is not the last person who has trembled under the lashings of inspiration. An acting out through her form, by another intelligence, a deep sense of wrong she had received, may have made her seem as mad in the eyes of Winthrop, as the learning and forceful utterances of Paul did him in those of Festus.

Evidence produced at her trial shows that Margaret Jones correctly foretold the course of diseases in the systems of those who declined her prescriptions--that she foretold other "things which came to pass accordingly"--that she learned the purport of conversations by the absent or secluded--that a spirit child became visible in her auras--and that the sickened maid was cured by her appliances. Each and all of these very marvelous manifestations were just as distinctly and authentically recorded on paper still extant, as were those less rare ones which have been put forth as fair indices of the case. Such blinking out of sight the most important things pertaining to the person who, as far as is now known, was first on this side the Atlantic to be executed for witchcraft, is unjust to culture and philosophy, which should be furnished with all known facts; is unjust to the fathers, whose full basis for her prosecution and execution should be set forth ere just judgment of their doings can be formed; and is unjust to her whose transcendent powers and effective labors for healing the sick may have been the main cause why minds deluded by a false and frenzying creed devil-ward, were impelled on to barbarously destroy one who had been and might have continued to be their benefactress.

She was a natural conduit from the inner to the outer world, through which perhaps impersonal force at times might cause supernal knowledge and power to come into her outer being; through which again, her own will might suction such, while at other times unseen persons might inject them through from their abodes, and even come themselves to aid her in their application. Nothing harmful was charged against her, excepting what seemed to be, and were believed to be, superhuman abilities.

The power that formed her originally, implanted and developed within her organism unusual capabilities for curing physical disease, for reading the future, and hearing the distant. There is neither evidence nor foundation for a conjecture that she was ever pupil of teachers of medical science, or of jugglery, nor that she belonged to any mesmerically developing circle. Her acts cannot well have been mere imitations of what she had seen others do, or had read or heard of having been done. She had no teachers, no confederates that were visible and tangible. Indeed, who among men could possibly have taught or helped her to prophesy correctly, to hear the far distant, or to embody a spirit child? Not one--not one. Such performances were only natural evolutions from her inborn faculties, when acted upon by spirit forces or agents, or both. The reader is asked how these manifestations, through our first martyr to it, can _possibly_ be explained on the hypothesis that witchcraft was nothing else than the histrionic tricks of sprightly and cunning children, either singly or in combination with the ingenuities and malignities of old women. Such agents, unaided from out the unseen, were most clearly incompetent to project into human view some phenomena which attended upon this consternating seer, hearer, healer, and holder of properties for materializing a spirit form so as to render it visible.

What possible facts or considerations could have induced the humane, intelligent, virtuous, and religious community in which she lived, to seek the life of such a woman, moving, probably, in humble sphere, but, in the main, a doer of good works? The question brings up a complex and difficult problem, viz., How can the seeming stupidity and inhumanity of our fathers be reconciled with their obvious intelligence and humaneness?

Assuming the record of testimony given in court to be correct--and why should we not?--the manifestations through and around Margaret Jones clearly indicated the outworking there of some abilities which the bodies and ordinary mental powers of embodied human beings do not possess. What then? Some unseen power must have helped her. What unseen power? Yes, _what_ unseen power? Experience as then interpreted--religious creeds as then understood--science and philosophy as they then existed--all conspired to give one and the same answer, viz., _The Devil_. That conclusion from the witnessed facts was then inevitable. The devil helped her. What next? The devil could help no one who had not previously entered into a covenant with him, and he surely helped this woman. Therefore she had made a covenant with him, and in making that she became a _witch_. The law of God which binds Christians says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Thus our forefathers saw and reasoned. Steps from facts to the conclusion were few, short, and plain. Feeble intellects _could_ take them, and strong ones _must_ do so, or reject their life-long creeds. Then a crucial hour was upon them. To distrust and disregard their credal faith or stifle their humanity, one or the other, was the hard alternative presented to strong, good men. Their cherished creed or Margaret Jones, one or the other, must be sacrificed. Which? Clear heads and life-long affections grasped the creed firmly, and resolved to save it. They let Logic draw her rigid conclusions, and put them forth as rules for individual and public action. Sympathy went down before dominant faith, and man stifled every rebellious emotion. God's call and law, Christian men then felt, were paramount to sympathy. In submission to what they deemed Heaven's will and call they said, "Down, humaneness--down! Up, God-derived Faith--up, in your majesty and might! Heart must follow whither you lead." Their awful and cramping _Creed devil-ward_ was the chief fountain of bewildering and brutalizing force that dragged intelligent and kind men on to redden our soil with innocent blood, and that too "in all good conscience."

Look closely at their position. The faith of all ages and nations had held that occurrences which seemed to result from supermundane force were produced by disembodied intelligences. Protestant Christendom was extensively holding that no invisible beings, excepting their Great Monstrous Monk-made Devil (see Appendix) and his obedient servants, could by any possibility work upon the bodies and possessions of men. And none such could work upon the external world in any other way than through, or by the aid of, such mortals as had voluntarily made a covenant with him. Such covenant once formed, the person making it would be an open door through which his fearful Majesty, or any imp of his, could freely enter the outer world and vent his malignity upon all the region far and wide around his entrance-place. Her works proved to the intellect of that day that this Margaret had covenanted to let him enter and co-operate with her. What, therefore, must be done? It was manifest to the people of Charlestown that through her the great invisible cloven-foot had found entrance, and was prowling among them. What was their duty? They must bar his entrance promptly. To do it, they arrested, tried, condemned, and executed the Christian traitor who had furnished their great enemy entrance to the Christian fortress. Could firm, true men, holding then prevalent beliefs, have done less?

That prisoner was put to trial before judge, jury, and a public who each and all held the then common creed throughout all Protestant Christendom which is set forth in our Appendix. Witnesses swore that she accurately foretold the effects of medical treatment and other events; that she heard speeches by persons far remote from her; that a spectral child was seen in her presence; that her hands and simples wrought marvels,--therefore, how could jurors avoid conviction that the devil helped her? There was no spectral testimony in this case; outer senses of many persons had learned her supermundane powers. The nature of the testimony was unexceptionable, and its purport distinct and conclusive. The prevalent faith imperatively demanded that the verdict should be--_guilty_. The clear, strong faith of that day, in whomsoever it conjoined with good conscience and courage, put forth mighty power to persuade the good citizen and good man that high duty was calling upon him to gird on heavenly armor and fight for the destruction of this minion and colleague of the devil, even at the smothering of kindlier sentiments in his heart. She was _witch_, and therefore must die. Was that a _deluded_ court, representative of a _deluded_ people, which condemned Margaret Jones to "hang high on the gallows-tree"? No doubt it was. Delusion led not only our fathers here, but all Christendom, on to deeds of shameful bloodshed. Witchcraft itself, as a whole, is now by most people deemed a "_dark delusion_." But which, among the human faculties, did that delusion spell-bind, stultify, and make sanguinary?

Were the external senses of a whole community so disordered that the character and dimensions of sensible acts were grossly misapprehended? No. The circumstances amid which the early colonists lived, were certainly as well fitted to sharpen, discipline, and give reliability to the external senses as those which wait upon their descendants in the present century. Whatever eyes saw, ears heard, or touch felt in 1648, was reported to the mind then as accurately as the same senses can report to-day. Witchcraft phenomena were not the fictions of deluded _senses_.

Did that delusion dominate those mental faculties which clothe in words and report what the senses had learned, and derange them so effectually that they would put forth even under oath distorting and exaggerated accounts of facts which the senses had witnessed? We think not. Distrust of the truthfulness and discrimination of ancient unknown witnesses, founded mainly upon the marvelousness of facts they swore to knowledge of, is not a basis that either candor or justice can deem sufficient to sustain a charge that their testimony was misleading. Wherein lurks anything which indicates that the witnesses in this case stated anything that was not substantially true? If anywhere, it is probably in modern incredulity that spirits ever colabor with or act upon men. If the time shall come--and there now exist signs that it is near--when the cultured world shall learn that _science_ has been unwittingly _generating delusion_ by failing to detect and regard the existence of certain occult agents and forces which play important parts in scenes of nature and human society, then a greatly modified opinion concerning the truth of testimony evoked in witchcraft times may prevail throughout the enlightened world. The signs of to-day make it prudent, kind, and just to conceive that ancient _witnesses_ were quite as truthful and discriminating as modern elucidators of remote transactions have generally been.

Were the faculties of jurors and judges for comprehending the accuracy, force, and tendency of testimony, and for logically deducing conclusions from proved facts, so deluded as that the whole court, without a misgiving, convicted either on false testimony or illogically? Candor must hesitate to say yes--especially in a case where such a man as Governor Winthrop sat upon the bench. He and his associates in the court may have been as free from any delusion that impaired or perverted their powers of discrimination, or for logical inferences from facts, as any court that has adjudicated since their day. The absolute cruelty and injustice of their verdict and sentence, however, do indicate delusion of some faculties; but not of the senses; not of the capacities to speak truth, and "nothing but the truth;" not of the capacities to sift evidence and to reason logically--not of these.

Their faculties for receiving, containing, holding on to, and obeying an inherited FAITH were the _deluded_ ones. In common with all Christendom the convictors of witches had been deluded into adoption, or at least retention, of a woful creed concerning the devil. At that time public sentiment in most countries on the continent of Europe, and also in both Old and New England, demanded rigid enforcement of all laws which that false, mischief-working creed had engendered and recorded in statute-books. Such laws were plain and imperative; both jurors and judges, suppressing sentiment, must yield to logic--must convict and sentence. By no other course could they be true to their convictions of duty toward society around them, or toward God on high. Yes; an imported monastic-born FAITH, unnatural, erroneous, and more than barbarous, deluded kind and good men to feel that they must suppress sympathy, ignore their tender impulses, benumb their hearts, and, whither God's voice was believed to call, go forward in stern, agonizing resolve to thrust a devil-helped worker, however good and estimable in outward seeming, to where the wicked one could do them and theirs no mischief through that mortal ally. Such was the logical and stern demand of the old deluding and heart-curbing creed.

Do we wonder in our day how such monstrous faith could ever have obtained and kept both an abiding hold and controlling authority in any clear head that was joined to a kindly heart? Seeds of faith get lodgment in the human brain while it is yet too young to understand or even try to test the nature and quality of what falls upon it. Whatever the church and public believe, and have believed through a long past, is ever dropping its own seed into opening minds, which forthwith germinates therein. This sends its roots deep into virgin soil, grows with vigor there, and becomes fruitful of the same old faith during that very early portion of life in which the infantile questioning, analyzing, and reasoning faculties are scarce able to doubt the soundness or excellence of what thence has grown and matured in close alliance with themselves. Faith's right and fitness to define duty, and the child's obligation to execute its requirements, are usually conceded by all the other faculties. The truer and better the man, the more surely will he carry out his faith to its logical demands, even though, Abraham like, he have to lay his dearest on the altar of sacrifice, to lift the knife, and nerve himself to plunge it into his own child's heart, unless some voice from on high, more potent than previous faith, shall bid him hold. Few other than strong men and true, conscious of being soldiers in heaven's army, would march resolutely to the Devil's living and shotted guns, purposing to destroy them; for their destruction was instinct with, and inseparable from, anguish to Christian neighbors and friends. Extremists alone would do that. None midway between vile demons and men of high faith in God would voluntarily meet that ordeal.

We do not regard _all_ the active prosecutors and convictors of witches as having been actuated by well-defined faiths and high principles. When popular furor sets strongly in any direction, the thoughtless, the unprincipled, the cruel, the malicious, join in the rush, and some such often become conspicuous and heartless agents in confounding confusion and in executing public decrees. Still, nearly all eminent men of both Europe and America--the leading divines, jurists, and civilians, the men of culture and of influence--believed that witchcraft and the witchcraft devil existed, and that witches should be detected and punished by the processes and laws then deemed applicable in such cases. Therefore, the mass of the people, however ignorant, thoughtless, or rash, when detecting and punishing witches, were only hastening to effect by rough processes and expeditiously, no more than the learned, more orderly, and patient would have felt constrained to accomplish, in the end, from a firm conviction of duty. Good faith and conscientious regard for the public weal actuated and sustained all those "solid men of Boston" and its vicinity, who were the real bones, sinews, and muscles which brought the devil's seeming helper to the gallows.

Whether this impressible and unfolded woman was literally aided in any of her marvelous operations by invisible _intelligences_ may be debatable. It is possible that forces subject to no will but her own, and not even to that at all times, may have passed from her into other persons, which relieved some and agonized others extensively. Medication of her simples may have been mainly their natural absorption of elements residing in her system, or which were naturally attracted into and through that peculiar system. Her correct perceptions of the future action of remedies prescribed by either herself or others, and of the future course and result of diseases, may have been obtained by her own inner faculties when partially and transiently disentangled from her outer ones, and sensing in knowledge from the hidden realm of causes. So too she may have been at times so nearly a freed spirit, that she could by her own perceptives accurately sense coming events, and hear the words of far distant speakers. We refrain from denying the possibility that such auras resided in, emanated from, and surrounded her body, that a spirit child coming within them was by natural impersonal forces there rendered visible to external optics. It is possible there was no phenomenon in this case that must be called _spiritual_, excepting the mere _advent_ of the child--not its visibility, but its _advent_. If the child was there, then a spirit was there, and it was a case of Spiritualism. All this is possible; but we ask whether it is probable that all works seeming to be hers were produced by blind natural forces and her own will and powers solely? To this our own answer is an emphatic NO. The presence of the child gives force to that response. If one spirit came to her, others could have come.