Lucinda Messer

“On November 26, 1694, more than two years after the witchcraft court had fallen, Parris read a scathing condemnation of his ministry from the pulpit, Francis Nurse following along with the original on his lap to make sure that his reverend omitted nothing. Parris had fostered a climate of accusation. The girls made prayer impossible; the aggrieved families preferred to attend meeting where they might actually hear the sermon. Given the reckless allegations, they had feared for their lives. They refused to accept communion from the hand of a man so at odds with accepted doctrine, one who expressed no charity and who pursued unfounded methods with the “bewitched or possessed persons.” (They made Parris seem like a bit of a madman, out of step with the rest of the clergy. They nowhere accused him of having manufactured a crisis, however.) He had testified against the accused. His court accounts were faulty, his doctrine unsound, his self-justifications offensive. When he had finished,”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“One bit of reckoning remained. On August 25, 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. stood amid the Salem village congregation to be admitted as a full church member. She was twenty-seven. Both her parents had died, leaving nine siblings in her care. Ann had not married. In more prosperous times, she had been afflicted by at least sixty-two people, among them her former minister, now dead; a neighbor, now dead; and teenage Dorothy Good, now insane. Of the nineteen who had been hanged, she had testified under oath against all but two. For over eight months whole communities had hung on her every syllable. She now stood silently as, from the same pulpit on which she had wildly pointed to a yellow bird during Lawson’s sermon, Salem’s new minister read aloud her confession. The onetime prophet”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“In July 1697 the matter went to three arbitrators, including two former witchcraft judges. To them the Nurse family complained that Parris led his congregants into “dangerous errors, and preached such scandalous immoralities” that he ought be dismissed from his profession. He had stifled some accusations while encouraging others. He had sworn to falsehoods. Both sides reached to hyperbole; as his critics saw it, Parris had “been the beginner and procurer of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them.” The arbitrators ruled against him. Parris returned to Stow, the remote hamlet where he had preached earlier. Immediately embroiled”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

“Given the “reiterated strikes of God upon himself and his family,” Sewall was acutely aware of the guilt he had contracted on the witchcraft court. He beseeched God to forgive his sin and punish neither anyone else nor New England for his misstep.* When Willard had finished reading what was in effect a single, jam-packed sentence—one that included “blame,” “shame,” “sin,” and “guilt,” four words Parris had studiously avoided—Sewall bowed from the waist. He then took his seat.”
― Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692