Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
The same, I said, when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather, President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader, of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of fools and worse than fools they were
The same, I said, when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather, President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of fools and worse than fools they were
I knew my grandmother, and loved her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil. That was Salem, though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to
Mather not to send him any more such papers, unless he could be allowed to copy and use them. It seems that, in answer to a subsequent letter, Mather sent to him a copy of Richard Baxter's Certainty of the World of Spirits, to which, after some time, Calef found leisure to reply, expressing his dissent from the views given in that book, and treating the subject somewhat at large.
One other remark, by the way. The account Sewall gives of the impression made by Burroughs, on the spectators, now first brought to light, in print, is singularly confirmatory of what Calef says on the subject. My chief purpose, however, in citing this passage from Sewall's Diary, is this. Mather was not present at the Trial of Burroughs.
Of these, the two Brattles, Robert Calef, and John Leverett were the foremost; and they served their mother well, though the debt of gratitude and honor which she owes them she has never yet repaid. Hist.
It was written, Calef, and thus printed, in the title-page of his book; so that Mather's variation of it was unjustifiable, and an unworthy taunt.
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."
In his account of "the afflictions of Margaret Rule," printed by Calef, in his book, and from which the foregoing extracts have been made speaking of the "eight cursed spectres" with which she was assaulted, in the fall of 1693, Mather says: "She was very careful of my reiterated charges, to forbear blazing their names, lest any good person should come to suffer any blast of reputation, through the cunning malice of the great accuser; nevertheless, having since privately named them to myself, I will venture to say this of them, that they are a sort of wretches who, for these many years, have gone under as violent presumptions of witchcraft as, perhaps, any creatures yet living upon earth; although I am far from thinking that the visions of this young woman were evidence enough to prove them so."
If another instance be wanted, take this: Major Calef, of Boston, officiated as marshal at the funeral of his friend, Gen. Francis Walker. In so doing he caught a cold, of which he died. An evening paper hereupon published a cartoon showing Major Calef walking arm in arm with Death at General Walker's funeral.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking