English Response: Go Suck a Lemon

Go Suck a Lemon

I know I already wrote about Reverend Hale in class, but I want to talk about him some more. I think that Reverend Hale is trying too hard to please everybody. He thinks of himself as a professional because the people of Salem asked him to come to their town to sort things out. He honestly believes that he knows the signs and symptoms of witchcraft, and that the things that he does to help people are judicious and helpful.

Taking into account that this was in the 17^th century when people really didn’t know much, maybe Hale really thought his “facts” on witchcraft were really fact. That being the case, he thought that he was really doing the world some good by ridding it of witches. However, I would really like to know where he got these “truths” from. Somehow, these things must have become “fact”. Obviously his methods had never been proved before. Maybe he thought that his methods worked, seeing how he had convicted witches before. It seems strange to me that people would trust his opinion when his methods of finding a witch when they hadn’t really been proven before.

Hale began to see that maybe there weren’t as many witches as he thought there were in the world. When so many people were accused of being a witch, he began to see that maybe people just started accusing other people of witchcraft to get the attention away from themselves or to try and get the accused into trouble. He began to see that people could cause mischief without the devil’s influence.