Witch Craft :: essays research papers

Around the seventeenth century, the belief in ena more(prenominal)s and witch craft was almost everywhere. The Church of Rome, more than three hundred geezerhood ago, allowed penalizations for the use of witch craft and after that yards of suspected people were burnt alive, drowned or hanged. In the sixteenth century, more than one hundred thousand charge and convicted people burned in the flames, in Germany. In England, learned person men adopted the belief. The famous Sir Matthew Hale, who flourished during the civil war, the commonwealth and the period of the issue of monarchy, repeatedly sentenced persons to death accused of witch craft. The Puritans brought the belief with them to America. They established laws for the punishment of witches, and before 1648, four people had suffered death for the supposed offence, in the likeness of Boston. The ministers of the gospel there were shadowed by the delusion, and because of their powerful social influence, they did more to foster the waste excitement and produce the distressing results of what is known in history as "Salem witch craft," than all others.      In 1688, a wayward daughter of John Goodwin of Boston, about thirteen years of age, accused a servant girl of stealing some of the family linen. The servants mother, a "wild Irish woman" and a Roman Catholic, impassioned disapproval the accuser as a false witness. The young girl, in revenge, pretended to be fascinate by the Irish woman. Some others of her family followed her example. They would alternately become deaf, dumb and blind, struggle like dogs and purr like cats, but none of them lost their appetites or sleep. The Rev. Cotton Mather, a simple and conceited minister rushed to Goodwins kinfolk to ease the witchery by prayer. Wonderful were the supposed effects of his desire. The friction match was controlled by them for the time. Then four other ministers of Boston and one of Salem, as superstitious as himself, joined Mather they spent a whole sidereal day in the house of the "afflicted" in fasting and prayer, the result of which was the actors line of one of the family from the power of the witch. This was enough proof for the minds of the ministers that there must be a witch in the case, and these ignorant minister prosecuted the ignorant Irish woman as such. She was confused before the court, and spoke sometimes in her native Irish language, which nobody could understand, and which her accusers and judges explain into involuntary confession.