Reverend Hale, who enters Salem Naïve and convinced of his greatness in discerning spirits, realizes he has cause irreparable damage. In order to right one of his many wrongs, he wishes for Elizabeth Proctor to convince John Proctor to sign a false confession in order to save his life. John Proctor stated a quoted, “I speak my own sins. I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.” Proctor confesses to witchcraft yet refuses to incriminate others.
The very idea of witchcraft is reprobated, as Reverend Parris reiterates, "Thomas, Thomas, I pray you, leap not to witchcraft. I know thatyou least of all, Thomas, would ever wish so disastrous a charge laid upon me. We cannot leap to witchcraft. They will howl me out of Salem for such corruption in my house." (14) When the court becomes involved, the judges, reproving the practice of witchcraft in any form, are more prone to believing the girls' accounts of the torture each condemned person had inflicted upon them by the
the defense lawyer for the Sarah Good witchcraft trial, and I am pleading for you to compromise and understand the facts. Sarah Good may have been part of the lower class and was looked down upon but she was well known by some of her neighbors she had seemed to be “pleasant and friendly.” You have come up with these wild attacks on my client, has it occurred to you that all these accusations may merely be lies from the community to get rid of this innocent human. “Sarah Good what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “The Examination of Sarah Good” Without solid evidence you try to prove my client guilty and constantly abuse your powers to harass her. From these three children you bring your judgments they are not to be trusted, they
Though the accused witches were not strictly female, the accused were predominantly women and more specifically older women, older women were seen as more fragile and impressionable so the devil could convince them to do his dirty work quiet easily.POV Two Dominican monks, Kramer and Sprenger, wrote a handbook used to identify witches by the Inquisition. In this book they explained that women are more credulous and carnal then men so they are more often found to be the devil’s workers. They think they know what they know because they are men and view women as a weaker sex. They are biased against women and are clearly sexist as they chose to blame women for being
Their decision to turn away from God-despite living in paradise because of him- created the first evil and gave rise to original sin, something all humans are born with (According to Catholicism.) The misuse of free will in turning away from God leads to obsession to worldly objects such as money. It is important to note that Augustine does not believe money is evil, he believes obsession with money, and any other secular object for that matter, draws away from God and leads the soul to sin. With obsession, as is human nature, comes addiction. Augustine believed that addiction was excessively evil, and as well as being a sin, conflicted with the process of free will.
And just when I realized that now even the most innocent person could be accused and arrested, Marshal Herrick came to my house. Abigail, that wretched, jealous girl, had marked Elizabeth for witchcraft. I must admit, I had been quite naive when I believed that the people of this village were a rational and unimpressionable people, raised as we were to be wary of all things wicked and sinful. But it may be that our blockade on all of these things has left us untrained and
The puritans did not separate Church and State. The puritans lived by a moral code. They believed that sinful people should be punished. The puritans saw it as they were doing the will of God by riding the world of such demonic acts or lifestyles. Finding witches seemed to become a crusade.
John Proctor tried to keep his affair with Abigail from the court as long as possible until he pretty much had to break down and confess it. But instead of Abigail and the witch trials being exposed as a lie, Proctor is called a liar and then accused of witchcraft by the court. His sins being exposed destroyed him. THE CRUCIBLE is an excellent play that combines three basic ingredients for chaos. There wouldn't be any chaos without ideological insecurity, economic self-interest, and personal indiscretion throughout the characters.
“Danforth: Why ‘must’ you say it! Why, you should rejoice to say it if your soul is truly purged of any love for Hell! Proctor: They think to go like saints. I like not to spoil their names.”(Miller 141) This quote perfectly shows an instance where the authority is trying to get someone scared enough to lie about someone else condemning their name in public but John stays true to his conscience and chooses not to live but die in vain only knowing that his death would neither stop nor increase the witch hunt. In the end however when people finally opened their eyes and saw what was going on they realized that the world was going mad and only their consciences could save
Women did not escape torture and punishment during this violent era - Anne Askew was put to the rack for her religious beliefs, and subsequently died, during the reign of Elizabeth's father King Henry VIII.” (William Shakespeare info) This shows that all classes were punished for their crimes, not just the lower class. The nobility could not escape punishment, however they are automatically exempt from torture but other courtiers were not. In Romeo and Juliet, violence is portrayed as universal. To portray the image of violence in the characters, Shakespeare has the Prince recite a monologue to the fighters… “...You men, you beasts, that quench the fire of your pernicious rage with purple fountains issuing from your veins, on pain of torture, from those bloody hands throw your distempered weapons to the ground and hear the sentence of your moved prince. three civil brawls, bred of an airy word, by thee, old Capulet, and Montague,