Cotton Mather was a famous preacher, Puritan minister, and author who is best known for his justification of the 1692 Salem witch trials. His Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1693, showcases just how insular and extreme the New England religious communities had become by the end of the seventeenth century. In general, the Puritan outlook can be understood simply by examining the word "Puritan." Puritans intended to “purify” what they believed was a perversion of the theological principles of the Church of England by establishing colonies in the New World that would serve as moral paragons that Old World believers would be inspired by. They were therefore adamant about weeding out and exterminating any act of heresy and any indication of the Devil’s work that might pollute the purity of their message.

The paranoia many Puritan followers felt regarding the intrusion of the Devil into the daily happenings of their community is apparent in Mather’s address. For Mather, the machinations of the Devil had been carried out by witches, who, he believed, had proliferated throughout the small pious town of Salem. As he attests,

An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sort, the first-born of our English settlements: and the houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants, tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether preternatural.

That the hands which have caused such havoc are “invisible” reinforces, both in Mather’s mind and to the fanatically religious Puritan commonperson, that an unseen force was threatening the sanctity of their community and that extreme measures must be taken. This fear materialized in the trial and forced confession of a large number of Salem witches, including Martha Carrier, whose case Mather uses to exemplify the situation at large. More fundamentally, the pacing, tone, and sense of urgency in Mather’s writing characterizes the narrow, reactionary worldview that many Puritan townspeople of this era maintained. Puritanism was a religion that demanded the utmost piety and rigidity in the conduct of one’s daily affairs. Any action that may have seemed out of place could be taken to be sacrilegious and a sign of the Devil at work.

Something else that Mather’s recollection of Carrier’s case makes evident is the unimpressive quality of evidence that was adequate to convict a person of witchcraft. Mather recalls, for example, that

the look of Carrier then laid the afflicted people for dead; and her touch, if her eye at the same time were off them, raised them again.

In Mather's view, Martha Carrier's fear-inducing gaze stands as sufficient evidence to prove that she was indeed possessed by the Devil. In Puritan society, one can be renounced simply through circumstantial evidence and superstition. Mather concludes his essay by referring to Carrier as a “rampant hag” and suggesting that the Devil had promised to make her the Queen of the Hebrews (further implying her un-Christian character). Wonders of the Invisible World is an extremely telling, if unfortunate, window into the religious superstition and prejudice of seventeenth-century Puritan New England.