"The Devil, & his instruments, will be making War, as long as they can,
with the Lamb & his Followers." Rev. Samuel Parris, 11 September 1692.

To gain full membership in the congregation, which included partaking of communion and voting rights on church policy, Parris instituted the old practice of a public confession of “faith and repentance wrought in their souls.” In Parris's formulation of the policy, men were required to make a confession of faith and repentance "before and in the presence of, the whole congregation" and "with their own tongues and mouths." In the case of women, "we would not lay to much stress upon [a verbal confession] but admit of a written confession and profession, taken from the person or persons by our pastor." Moreover, "persons shall not be admitted by a mere negative: that is to say, without some testimony from the Brethren."¹¹ Even the mother church in Salem had abandoned this custom and substituted an easier procedure which required a month's observation of good behavior, followed by a private affirmation of the covenant to the minister.¹² While the rest of New England had moved toward embracing a wider religious community regarding baptism and church membership, the Salem Village church was headed in the opposite direction.

It must have been surprising, then, when the rest of the village learned that Parris and his new congregation had established the old covenant and the practice of public testimony. Nevertheless, between January 1690 and January 1691, twenty-seven people joined the village church. With this influx of new members, the congregation more than doubled in size, and Parris began to baptize their children in large numbers. In the next seven months, however, only seven Villagers joined the church. After August 1691 no one joined for the rest of the year, and baptisms fell off dramatically.¹³

At this juncture in October 1691 the Village meeting voted a new five-man Village Committee into office, and this time it was made up entirely of Parris's opponents: Joseph Porter, Joseph Hutchinson, Joseph Putnam, Daniel Andrew, and Francis Nurse. The same meeting declined to authorize the Committee to set a tax rate for the year, thus preventing the collection of taxes for Parris's salary. The meeting also raised objections to the amount of Parris's salary and questioned validity of the agreement that gave him ownership of the parsonage.¹⁴

Having just established its own full-fledged congregation, some in the Village might have felt that the ministry was now in the control of the congregation alone. But nothing had changed. The Villagers as a whole, whose tax money supported the ministry, had become used to determining the affairs of the church, and the they were not willing to give up their power.

By November 1691, the new congregation, consisting of sixty-one adult members and eighty baptized children, had stopped growing. Some of the villagers had organized themselves into an opposition movement and attracted others to their cause. The effect was to stymie the growth of the new church and turn public opinion against the new minister.To be sure, in this period in the Bay Colony only a minority of people within any given Puritan community joined the church covenant, but, as Gragg points out, the abrupt halt in Salem Village is indicative of the rising level of opposition to Parris. No one would join the new congregation for the next two years, and the number of baptisms declined radpidly. Already in the summer of 1691 a frustrated Parris had threatened those who failed to "profess" Christ and become members of the congregation: "If you are ashamed to own Christ now, to profess him before the World . . . hereafter Christ will be shamed of you."¹⁵

A complaint written by Parris's supporters dated December 26, 1692 spelled out the situation that had developed since 1691. It mentioned the growing influence of "a few" who had "drawn away others" and caused even those who were sympathetic to Parris to "absent themselves" from Village meetings or refrain from casting their vote. Indeed, hardly any meetings were held in the Village during the year to address the issue of Parris's unpaid salary.¹⁶ People also began to absent themselves from church services, and the meeting house began to fall into disrepair. Parris's record book describes growing absenteeism from church meetings, a clear sign of waning enthusiasm, which he felt as a "slight and neglect" that "did not a little trouble me." On January 3, 1691, Parris had to cut short his sermon because it was too cold in the meeting house to continue.

Looming large in the background was the majority of the Villagers who, once the agitation against Parris began, refrained from joining his congregation, thus empowering the opposition leaders. According to Puritan practice, only covenanted members could partake of communion. On any given communion Sunday, more than half those in attendance had to take their leave in the presence of the small group of communicants -- an overt demonstration of the division within the community. Map 2 shows the large number of households of non-church members in the Village -- fifty-seven all told. Non-church members numbered approximately 135 adults and comprised about sixty percent of the adult population. And, as Map 2 indicates, these households were spread evenly across the Village langscape.¹⁷

Unfortunately, the source documents do not give us the Villagers’ reasons for their dispute with Parris. We can only surmise the causes based on the actions taken against him and the sudden halt in church membership. Economically, Parris drove a hard bargain for his salary and benefits, including a year's supply of firewood in addition to his salary and outright possession of the minister's house, which was unprecedented.¹⁸ He also wanted to augment his salary by taking the funds contributed by non-villagers who attended the Village church, of which there were quite a few. Negotations about his salary and benefits were drawn-out and abrasive. The negotiations were conducted at different times by different men from the Village, and several key points had been left unresolved before Parris arrived, a portent of future trouble. Politically, Parris associated himself with the influential Putnam families and their relatives in the Village, and their backing meant that any objections to Parris would be met with strong resistance. Theologically, Parris instituted the restrictive old convenant and, as we shall see below, was quick to characterize opposition to himself as an attack upon his new congregation by agents of the Devil. Psychologically, Parris was a domineering and grasping personality, jealous of his position and suspicious of his opponents. Although there had been vigorous conflicts over ministers in the past, none involved such intransigence on the minister's part nor the outright refusal to collect the necessary taxes for his salary. It did not take long for many to get their backs up, refrain from joining the church, and try to drive Parris out.

In response to the growing opposition, Parris fought back in his sermons. Puritan practice required everyone to attend the worship services, whether they were communicants or not. Thus, the whole Village listened as Parris harangued them with visions of spiritual warfare and warned of evil forces at work against the congregation. It was Parris's repeated sermons about the activity of demonic forces in the Village and the Devil's attempt to "pull down" his new congregation that first raised the specter of demonic activity in the Village. Although references to the work of the Devil were common in Puritan preaching (and Parris took his sermon topics from a standard preaching guide), the activity of the Devil became an increasingly significant theme in Parris's sermons, with pointed reference to the opposition movement in the Village. As the editors of Parris's sermons point out, "the Satanic theme dominates his sermons during the four months immediately preceeding the witchcraft accusations."¹⁹ Parris deliberately translated his embattled situtation into a demonic attack on his church, attempting to condemn, indeed, to "demonize" his opponents.

Only a month after his ordination, Parris's preaching began to reflect the initial strain. He invoked the story of King Saul, who had become haunted with an "evil and wicked spirit" and had gone for advice "to the Devil, to a witch." In January, 1690 his chosen text was: "Cursed be he who doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully." There were, he said, "rotten-hearted" people in the Village community. The following month he referred more explicitly to his church's situation. "Oh, that we would have a care of false words." And he warned, "I am afraid there is great guiltiness upon this account in this poor little village." He noted that whole families were becoming drawn into the conflict and that "great hatred ariseth even from nearest relations." A year later, in January, 1691, Parris declared that "Christ having begun a new work, it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it down." The reference to the continued opposition and absenteeism was obvious. In February, when some Villagers were withholding payment, Parris preached a sermon with thinly veiled references to himself as Christ and his opponents as Judas. "Wicked men," he declared, "will give thirty pieces of silver to be rid of Christ . . . . . but they would not give half so much for his gracious presence and holy sermons [and] for the maintenance of the pure religion," an explicit reference to the stopping of his salary. He also warned reluctant Villagers not to be "ashamed" to profess Christ, a clear warning to those who held back from joining the congregation -- the majority of the Villagers.

In the summer of 1691, with the anti-Parris group growing in numbers, Parris badgered his congregation with references to attack by the Devil: "Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil." His sermons also projected a martial tone: "Christ furnisheth the believer with skill, strength. Courage. Weapons. And all military accomplishments for victory." Thus Parris portrayed the opposition to his ministry as opposition to the church itself, and warned of a great cosmic struggle between God and Satan was taking place in the Village in 1692.

By 11th of February, 1692, the situation had worsened. Parris lamented “the present low condition of the church in the midst of its enemies," but asserted that: "Oh, shortly the case will be far otherwise." Given this dark and threatening atmosphere of religious conflict, it is not surprising that the children in Parris's own household were the first to be affected. By mid-February, Dr. Griggs, a Village church member and friend of Thomas and Edward Putnam, had diagnosed the children in Parris's house to be afflicted by “the evil hand.” By this time Thomas Putnam’s twelve-year-old daughter Ann and Dr. Griggs' seventeen-year-old niece Elizabeth Hubbard had also become afflicted.

According to the Reverend John Hale, the minister in nearby Beverly who wrote an eyewitness account, Parris initially called in local ministers to observe his afflcited daughter and niece. The ministers, he says, “had enquired diligently into the Sufferings of the Afflicted, concluded they were preternatural, and feared the hand of Satan was in them" but first advised Parris that " he should sit still and wait upon the Providence of God to see what time might discover." Several weeks later, Griggs gave his diagnosis, and, says Hale, “the Neighbours quickly took up [Griggs’ diagnosis] and concluded they [the girls] were bewitched.”²⁰ A church member and close neighbor to Parris, Mary Sibley, then secretly arranged with John Indian, Parris's Indian slave, for a “witch cake” to be made from the children's urine. The purpose of this folk magic was to enable the children to identify the witches causing their distress. By Parris’s own admission the witch cake procedure not only confirmed that witches were at work in the village but prompted the first accusations. Nevertheless, in order to distance himself and his family from being the regarded as the instigators of the accusations, Parris rebuked Mary Sibley before his congregation for using “Diabolical means” (the witch cake) by which “the Devil hath been raised amongst us.”²¹

Although Parris’s blamed his parishioner for “raising” the Devil in the Village, it was Parris himself who had initially aroused Villagers’ fears of demonic activity and created the climate for the accusations. Parris also made a public spectacle of the girls’ disturbing “afflictions,” calling ministers from Salem and Beverly for prayer sessions. While the precise role Parris played is difficult to pin down, it was a crucial one. Sunday after Sunday, Parris referred to the escalating struggle over his ministry as a demonic attack on his church. Given this language and the communal understanding it created, there existed a conducive atmosphere for the witchcraft accusations. Thus, it is understandable that some in Parris’s congregation responded to what appeared to be demonic attacks on their children by seeking out the presence of the devil's agents -- witches -- in the Village.

On March 19th, 1692, less than three weeks after the accusations began, Samuel Parris and the Salem magistrates invited the former Village minister, the Reverend Deodat Lawson, to observe the situation and preach to the Village congregation. Lawson, hearing that the "the first Person Afflicted was in the minister's Family," wrote that he was deeply concerned because his own wife and daughter, who had died when he was minster in the Village, were now rumored to have been killed by "the Malicious Operations of the Infernal Powers." Upon his arrival in the Village, Mary Walcott and Abigail Williams, both children of church member families, confronted Lawson with their “grievous fits” and demonstrated their afflictions. Walcott screamed in pain that she was being bitten on the wrist, and Williams almost burned herself while "flying" uncontrollably into Parris's fireplace, while calling out against Rebecca Nurse.²²

The next day, Lawson began the Sunday worship service with a prayer, but he was immediately interrupted. As if to demonstrate that the devil’s aggression was aimed at the church, the afflicted girls and a Village matron stopped Lawson’s opening prayer with their "sore fits." Two of the girls, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam, Jr., then became possessed and spoke sharply to the astonished Lawson, attacking his ministerial authority. Speaking in bold voices, which were understood to be inspired by the devil, the two girls reprimanded Lawson in a spectacular display of gender misconduct and Satanic assault on the clergy. “After Psalm was sung,” Lawson reported, “Abigail Williams said to me, ‘Now stand up and Name your Text’: and after it was read, she said, 'it is a long text'.” As he began to preach, the respected middle-aged Bathshua Pope, entranced by the devil, disrupted his sermon, saying outrageously “Now there is enough of that.” At the afternoon service, Abigail Williams again spoke up while possessed and attacked Lawson by questioning his authority to preach: “I know no Doctrine you had, If you did name one, I have forgot it.” Ann Putnam chimed in and accused Lawson of having a “Yellow-bird,” a witch-familiar spirit, perched on his hat,²³ thus implying that he was an agent of the Devil. In these performances, the afflicted showed Lawson that more was at stake than just a few troubled girls: ministerial authority itself was threatened. The ministry was being attacked, and godly women and children of the congregation were being transformed into agents of Satan.

The accusers, however, took some risk in attacking Lawson during the service. The attack might have been misunderstood as an attempt to expose Lawson as a false preacher who didn't know his biblical texts or church doctrine and possessed a witch's animal spirit -- in short that he was an apostate minister who had joined the Devil. Such a claim, however, would have been seen as preposterous and thus would have undermined the girls' credibility as witch finders. They took this risk, perhaps, to demonstrate to Lawson that they were the helpless victims of the Devil who was using them to attack the church's ministry. The accusers may have wanted to drive home the point that the ultimate object of Satan's attack in Salem Village was not just a few afflicted girls and older women but the church itself. Indeed, this is how Lawson understood it, and he made it the subject of his Thursday sermon.

In his sermon on March 24th, Lawson told the congregation that God had specially targeted them as the "Covenant People of God" and had loosed Satan with his "Rage and Fury" upon them. “The Lord,” he said, had sent “this Fire of his Holy displeasure” to put out the "Fires of Contention" in the Village, presumably the intense conflict over their minister. Lawson urged the congregation to humble themselves before God and to "PRAY, PRAY, PRAY" for deliverance from the Satan's attacks. Near the end of his sermon, Lawson also addressed "Our HONOURED MAGISTRATES, here present." These magistrates were John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin who had just conducted the examination of Rebecca Nurse in the morning and had sent her to jail. By this time, the two magistrates had indicted and jailed five accused witches in a period of three weeks: Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, Martha Cory, and Rebecca Nurse. From the pulpit Lawson exhorted the magistrates to continue to "Do all that in you lies to check and rebuke Satan," and "to discover the instruments in these horrid operations." As the civil authorities responsbile for defending the church, "Being ordained of God to such a station (Rom. xiii. 1), we entreat you," urged Lawson, "to bear not the sword in vain, as ver. 4; but approve yourselves a terror of and punishment to evil-doers . . . ." ²⁴

Seven days later on March 31st, the Village and Town observed a public fast and offered special prayers for the afflicted. On the same day, Lawson reported that Abigail Williams had witnessed an invisible gathering of witches near Parris's house to celebrate the Devil's sacrament with "Red Bread and Red Drink." Thus Williams confirmed the congregation's worst fears: a demonic conspiracy to attack the church was operating in the Village itself, something initially mentioned by Tituba in her examination before the magistrates on March 2nd. The next day Mercy Lewis told of witnessing the same Satanic mass near the parsonage. While in a trance-like state, she related how the Devil enticed her to take the Devil's sacrament. which she refused, saying, "I will not Eat, I will not Drink, it is Blood," . . . ; "Christ gives the Bread of Life, I will have none of it!" Still in trance, she then described her vision of a "Glorious Place" with a heavenly choir singing Psalm 110.²⁵ This was one of the Psalms in Parris's January, 1692 sermon; and in the Christian context it refers to a risen and triumphant Christ conquering his enemies and making them his foot stool. Mercy's imagined temptation by the Devil and her report of seeing a heavenly choir singing about Christ's victory over evil clearly reflected Parris's sermons about the Village being torn between Satan and Christ.

In mid-April, Abigail Hobbs and Ann Putnam, Jr. accused the former village minister, the Reverend George Burroughs, who was then serving as the minister in Wells, Maine. Burroughs had left Salem Village in 1683 amidst gossip about spousal abuse after a bitter dispute over money initiated by John Putnam, with his pay still in arrears. Almost immediately the young accusers realized that in naming Burroughs they had identified the high priest of the Satanic church that was establishing itself in Salem Village. The discovery of a Puritan clergyman in league with Satan created a spectacular impact. It was probably this accusation that gave rise to the shocking notion that the Devil was not only attacking the Village church but attempting to undermine the whole Puritan enterprise. Burrough's role as the leader of the witches meant that the witchcraft activity in Salem Village was a not matter of random personal attacks but the work of a full-blown Satanic church, with a leader, whose goal was to recruit new members, baptize them, sign them into a covenant, and administer the sacrament to them. With this threat now widely known, new witchcraft accusations proliferated as did more reports of celebrations of the Devil's sacrament in Salem Village led by Burroughs. In late July, Mary Lacey called Burroughs the "King of Hell" and Martha Carrier his Queen. She also named Cory and Nurse as Satan's two Deacons. Such reports established the view that the witchcraft attacks in Salem Village were part of an institutionalized process of demonic assault, and they set the stage for a witch-hunt unlike anything previously seen in New England.

From this point onward, accusers and confessors reported seeing hundreds of witches under Burroughs command coming to Salem Village and to Andover to hold their meetings. It was partly Burroughs relationship with the Maine frontier and the Satan driven Indian attacks in that area that gave new impetus to the accusers and to the judges. After mid-April, the number of accusations increased dramatically and spread beyond the immediate environs of Salem Village to twenty-one other towns, targeting people whom the Village accusers had never even seen before. This phase of the witch-hunt is a complex story, involving an ever widening and more diverse field of socio-political elements, as Mary Beth Norton has recently shown.

By late August, 1692, the large witches' meetings led by Burroughs in Salem Village were so widely known that William Barker, Sr., one of the fifty-odd persons who confessed to witchcraft in the neighboring town of Andover, boldy told the court that he joined a meeting of a about a hundred witches, armed with swords and rapiers, "upon a green peece of ground neare the ministers house" and that there were now over three hundred witches in the country. "Our design," he said, "was to destroy Salem Village and to begin at the minister's house" and "to destroy that place [Salem Village] by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers -- Satan's design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next on Salem and soe go through the countrey. . . " ²⁶ Parris's dark warnings about the Devil opposing his ministry in Salem Village had now escalated into a Satanic conspiracy against all the churches in Massachusetts Bay. As Parris put it in a sermon delivered on September 11, 1692, “The Devil, & his instruments, will be making War, as long as they can, with the Lamb & his Followers.”

With Parris's strident sermons about “assistants of the Devil” at work in the Village against his church, now led by former Village minister Burroughs, it is not surprising that there was a strong correlation between the members of his congregation and the witchcraft accusers in the Village. A head count shows that a significant proportion, seventy percent (forty out of fifty-eight) of the afflicted accusers belonged to households headed by members of the village church. See Map 3. More significant is the fact that seventy-six percent (sixteen out of twenty-one) of the most active complainants and accusers (those who accused more than three people) belonged to the church member families. Moreover, seventy-five percent of those who initiated the witchcraft complaints, the sine qua non of the legal process, were either founding members of the village congregation or strong supporters of Parris. By late March, Lawson had concluded correctly that "Satan Rages Principally amongst the Visible Subjects of Christ's Kingdom," that is, the members of the Salem Village congregation.

Equally significant is the fact that a large proportion of those accused in the Village community, eighty-eight percent (twenty-three out of twenty-six), were not village church members.²⁷ See Map 4. It is apparent, then, that the witchcraft accusations in Salem Village sprang from within the heart of the embattled Village congregation. It is also apparent that the congregation’s fears were directed mainly against the many "outsiders" living among them -- those who were not members of the Village congregation -- a classic opposition between "us" and "them” within a bounded community. Indeed, the most sersious aspect of the Village accusations was the matter of conspiracy with the Devil to destroy the Village church. All the accused Villagers who were said to have covenanted with the Devil by "signing" the Devil's book and to have tried to force other church members to do the same, thus attempting to destroy the church, were tried and executed for witchcraft. By contast, none of the accused Villagers who were not said to have covenanted with the devil were ever brought to trial.

The precipitating conflict that engendered witchcraft fears was not a conflict between the Village and the Town, as Boyer and Nissenbaum proposed, but a vigorous struggle within the Village itself between Samuel Parris and a village-wide opposition movement. This is not to suggest that the accusations stemmed from a single motivation -- a desire to attack the unchurched residents. Not being a member of the congregation was not grounds for accusation or even suspicion. Nor did it mean that the leaders of the Parris opposition were specifically targeted, as only two out of the five opposition leaders were ever touched by the accusations. It did mean, however, that the Village accusers, whatever their grudges were against certain neighbors, were far more likely to accuse those who were not members of their congregation. Parris, whose sermons divided the Village into two groups, the godly and the "wicked and unchurched," provided a conducive framework for this process. Thus, membership in the Village congregation more than any other single factor -- geographic or economic -- became the distinguishing characteristic of the accusers and accused within the Village community.

After the witch trials were over in May 1693, it is evident that Parris continued to interpret the struggle against him in terms of church membership. In October, Parris was still identifying his enemies with the forces of Satan: "When Sin & conscience, men & Devils accuse us, why then let the death of Christ appease our bleeding, wounded & disquieted Souls." In May, 1695, supporters and opponents signed separate petitions, for and against Parris's retention as their minister. In copying these petitions into his record book, Parris carefully transcribed the names of the signers in two separate colums: "Church-Members" and the non-church residents or "Householders."²⁸ As it turned out, the majority (105) of signers were in favor of his retention, including all but one of the original church members. But the number of his opponents (84), while somewhat smaller, was large enough to convince the authorities that reconciliation was impossible and that Parris had to depart. Of these Village opponents, fifty were not members of the village church, and it was they who tipped the scale.

Unchurched Villagers, then, and fears of Satanic conspiracy were at the center of the issue, as the pattern of Village accusations reveals. This, of course, is a very general pattern within what is otherwise a large "web of contingency," to use David Hackett Fisher’s useful phrase.²⁹ Nothing in this episode was inevitable and nothing can be explained by law-like social forces. Yet within the Village context there was a definite pattern in the choices the accusers made: the "Devil's instruments" were most likely to be found among those who were not among the Village's elect, and it was the families of the elect that made most of the accusations.³⁰

As already mentioned, the historical sources do not reveal the grounds for the opposition to Parris nor do they say why most of the Villagers did not join the new congregation. Cotton Mather, however, apparently assumed there was a direct correlation between the retention of the old covenant and the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem Village. In mid-December 1692, Mather wrote a letter to John Richards, a leading member of Mather’s congregation, who was strongly opposed to Mather's wish to establish the Halfway Covenant. In the letter Mather sought to persuade Richards, who had served on the witchcraft court of Oyer and Terminer, by formulating what he assumed would be a telling argument: “I have seen that the Divels have been Baptising so many of our miserable Neighbours, in that horrible Witchcraft. . . I cannot be well at Ease, until the Nursery of Initiated Beleevers. . . bee duely Watered, with Baptism. . . I would mark [with baptism] as many as I should, that the Destroying Angels may have less claim to them.”³¹

Under the restrictive old covenant, Mather's parish, like Salem Village, would have included a large number of residents who were neither members of the church nor eligible for baptism. Because Mather read the court testimonies, he knew that the accused were said to have done the very thing that he feared that the unchurched might do: they had “signed” the “Devil’s book” and thus joined the Devil's covenant. Indeed,the records show that all but two of those convicted and executed in the Salem episode were accused of signing the Devil's book, a charge that characterized nearly half of the Salem cases; and Mather was fearful that the same demonic activity might spread among the unchurched in his own parish.

In 1693, after the witch trials were over, the Village was deeply divided over the question of Parris's retention. The following two maps show the locations of the households of those who signed petitions for and against retaining Parris in 1695. Both the pro-Parris and anti-Parris households were fairly evenly distributed across the Village. These maps do not show a Village geographically divided aggainst itself in the dispute over Parris. (See Maps 5 and 6) ³²

When Samuel Parris finally left Salem Village in 1695, his successor, Reverend Joseph Green, immediately instituted the Halfway Covenant and proceeded to baptize a flood children. For the first time in its history Salem Village warmly embraced its minister, and the church finally became the center of village unity it was intended to be.³³

Conclusion

The courts first heard about witches' gatherings in Salem Village from Tituba's confession at the start of the episode in which she reported spectrally seeing nine witches meeting inside Parris's house. The existence of invisible witches' meeting in the Village was soon corroborated by the afflicted children, who "saw" them in a field near the parsonage. In early April, Lawson estimate that there were twenty-three to twenty-four witches regularly meeting in the Village who "keep dayes of Fast and dayes of Thanksgiving, and Sacraments . . . ." Hence, Lawson concluded, "Satan endeavours to Transforme himself to an Angel of Light, and to make his Kingdom and Administrations to resemble those of our Lord Jesus Christ."³⁴ As time went on, wherever witchcraft afflictions occurred in Essex County, witnesses in court continued to link the source of these afflictions to witches meetings and Satanic masses in Salem Village. The court records suggest that the magistrates themselves shared this perspective from the beginning. In the process of questioning the accused, starting with Tituba, they elicited information about witches' meetings and about a Satanic conspiracy in the Village.Thomas Brattle in his famous Letter³⁵ opposing the trials, written in early October, also mentions the belief in witches' meetings and attributes it to the "Salem gentlemen," a term that included both local ministers and magistrates. Cotton Mather's justification of the witch trials in his Wonders of the Invisible World, written in October soon after the closing of the witch trials court, also makes reference to the testimonies about witches' meetings in Salem Village. Their purpose, he says, echoing both Parris's and Lawson's sermons, was the "Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country."³⁶ It seems apparent that the belief in Satan's targeting the new congregation in Salem Village and the fears of a wider assault on the churches of the Colony was the main reason for the large number of witchcraft accusations and convictions -- a number that is unique to the Salem episode.