95 et seq.
Toward the end of the same century similar manifestations began to appear on a large scale in America.
The life of the early colonists in New England was such as to give rapid growth to the germs of the doctrine of possession brought from the mother country.

Surrounded by the dark pine forests; having as their neighbours Indians, who were more than suspected of being children of Satan; harassed by wild beasts apparently sent by the powers of evil to torment the elect; with no varied literature to while away the long winter evenings; with few amusements save neighbourhood quarrels; dwelling intently on every text of Scripture which supported their gloomy theology, and adopting its most literal interpretation, it is not strange that they rapidly developed ideas regarding the darker side of nature.( 396) (396) For the idea that America before the Pilgims had been especially given over to Satan, see the literature of the early Puritan period, and especially the poetry of Wigglesworth, treated in Tylor's History of American Literature, vol.ii, p.

25 et seq.
This fear of witchcraft received a powerful stimulus from the treatises of learned men.

Such works, coming from Europe, which was at that time filled with the superstition, acted powerfully upon conscientious preachers, and were brought by them to bear upon the people at large.
Naturally, then, throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century we find scattered cases of diabolic possession.

At Boston, Springfield, Hartford, Groton, and other towns, cases occurred, and here and there we hear of death-sentences.
In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the fruit of these ideas began to ripen.