The people began to fall away.

Justice Bradstreet, having committed thirty or forty persons, became aroused to the absurdity of the whole matter; the minister of Andover had the good sense to resist the theological view; even so high a personage as Lady Phips, the wife of the Governor, began to show lenity.
Each of these was, in consequence of this disbelief, charged with collusion with Satan; but such charges seemed now to lose their force.
In the midst of all this delusion and terrorism stood Cotton Mather firm as ever.

His efforts to uphold the declining superstition were heroic.
But he at last went one step too far.

Being himself possessed of a mania for myth-making and wonder-mongering, and having described a case of witchcraft with possibly greater exaggeration than usual, he was confronted by Robert Calef.

Calef was a Boston merchant, who appears to have united the good sense of a man of business to considerable shrewdness in observation, power in thought, and love for truth; and he began writing to Mather and others, to show the weak points in the system.