superior” moral stance allowed them to dispense justice against those who believed differently. Mather’s overzealous desire to keep the community “pure” allowed him to paint those who held different beliefs as an “evil other.” He attributed those who practiced witchcraft as being under the powerful influence of “the Devil who has made a dreadful knot of witches in the country, and by the help of witches has dreadfully increases…a more gross diabolism, than ever the world saw before” (Mather 1950, 1).
Authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne protested the religious intolerance exhibited by such fanaticism in works like Young Goodman Brown. Goodman Brown meets a mysterious man in the woods who is portrayed as the devil. During the encounter, the man tells Brown he is not the first to walk this path, “I have been well acquainted with your family…I helped your
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