Please read:
The Horrors of the Invisible World: Searching for Lingering Chills

Excerpt:

Here we have ventured into the second element of true horror, uncertainty. If the past is not what you think it is, then neither is the present or the future. All is ready to change, but into what? Mather gives two extreme possibilities. On the one hand the presence of the church may be destroyed off this land. On the other, with Mather’s use of eschatological allusions, he only just shies away from declaring something like Revelation’s Millennial Kingdom. It is all or nothing, which irrevocably leads to the third element, a call to action.

Excerpt:

Then to compound the uncertainty hitherto mentioned, Mather opens the door to the possibility that the Devil might be tricking them: Could not a devil use his powers and deceive us into sending an innocent woman to the gallows? Here, I think, at the top of page 324 in Norton, is the key passage which makes this true horror. The devil may be fooling us, Mather intimates, but we would have to suspend the belief in our own understanding. Let the concept sink in. Reason itself could fail, trusting in our “understanding” may make us murderers, the shedders of innocent blood, ill actors, the monster of this narrative.

(You may read, if one wishes, an early form of my thesis: Essay in Progress)