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Updated: May 28, 2025
The article in the North American Review rests, throughout, upon a repudiation of the authority of Robert Calef. Its writer says, "his faculties appear to us to have been of an inferior order." "He had a very feeble conception of what credible testimony is." "If he had not intentionally lied, he had a very imperfect appreciation of truth." He speaks of "Calef's disqualifications as a witness."
He "pleaded with the Lord," saying that the design of this man was to hurt his "precious opportunities of glorifying" his "glorious Lord Jesus Christ." He earnestly besought that those opportunities might not be "damnified" by Calef's book. And he finished by imploring deliverance from his calumnies. So "I put over my calumnious adversary into the hands of the righteous God."
This vindication is mainly devoted to the case of the Goodwin children, twelve years before, and to a defence of the course of Increase Mather, in England, in reference to the Old and New Charters. No serious attempt was made to controvert material points in Calef's book, relating to Salem Witchcraft.
The Judges of the Court and the Jury confessed their errors; the people were astonished at their own delusion; reason and common sense were evidently on Calef's side; and even the present generation read his book with mingled sentiments of pleasure and admiration." Calef's book continues, to this day, the recognized authority on the subject.
On the fifteenth of January, Mather replied complaining, in general terms, of the narrative contained in Calef's Minutes, as follows: "I do scarcely find any one thing, in the whole paper, whether respecting my father or myself, either fairly or truly represented." "The narrative contains a number of mistakes and falsehoods which, were they wilful and designed, might justly be termed great lies."
Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard College yard. Bonfire? shrieked the little man. The bonfire when Robert Calef's book was burned?
When Calef's book reached this country, in 1700, a Committee of seven was raised, at a meeting of the members of the Parish of which the Mathers were Ministers, to protect them against its effects. John Goodwin was a member of it, and contributed the Certificate from which extracts have just been made.
So far as the truthfulness of Calef's statements, generally, is regarded, there is no room left for question.
This fashion has a prominent place among The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, by John Eachard, D.D., a work published in London, near the commencement of the last century one of the few books, like Calef's, which have turned the tide, and arrested the follies, of their times. In bold, free, forcible satire, Eachard's book stands alone.
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