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When Calef's letters were presently published in London, together with his account of the supposed witchcraft, the book was burned in the college yard at Cambridge by order of Increase Mather. The members of the Boston North Church came out also with a pamphlet in defence of their pastors.
Mather himself states, in his Diary, that the enmity between them arose out of Calef's opposition to his, Mather's, views relating to the "existence and influences of the invisible world." So far as we have any knowledge, their acquaintance began at the date just mentioned. The suggestion of pre-existing enmity, therefore, gives an unfair and unjust impression.
First printed in London, Calef's volume has gone through four American editions; the last, in 1861, edited by Samuel P. Fowler, is presented in such eligible type and so readable a form, as to commend it to favorable notice. It may be safely said that few publications have produced more immediate or more lasting effects. It killed off the whole business of Margaret Rule.
Robert Calef's cool pamphlet exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there are Baptist and Episcopal churches and a dancing-master.
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?
Such were the contents, and such the tone, of Calef's book. The course he pursued, his carefulness to do right and to keep his position fortified as he advanced, and the deliberate courage with which he encountered the responsibilities, connected with his movement to rid the country of a baleful superstition, are worthy of grateful remembrance.
On the fifth of November, Calef's book having been received in Boston, Mather again made it the occasion of Fasting and Praying. His friends also spent a day of prayer, as he expresses it, "to complain unto God," against Calef, he, Mather, meeting with them.
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?
Mather abandoned it altogether. In 1694, he said "the forgetting thereof would neither be pleasing to God nor useful to men." Before Calef had done with him, he had dropped it forever. Calef's book put a stop to all such things, in New and Old England. It struck a blow at the whole system of popular superstition, relating to the diabolical world, under which it reels to this day.
The earth is so thin, scattered between projecting ledges of rock, which, indeed, cover much of the surface, that few trees probably ever grew there; and a bare, elevated platform afforded a conspicuous site, and room for the purpose. These conclusions, to which recent discoveries and explorations have led, remarkably confirm Calef's statements.
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