Defending his role during the Salem Witch trials which had begun the previous year, Puritan Minister Cotton Mather wrote and published 'The Wonders of the Invisible World' in 1693. The work described a number of paranormal encounters including Witchcraft, and their attributing to the work of the Devil who Mather derided as the cause of the potential downfall of the grace of God in the Massachsetttes Bay Colony. This grace the book expounds would be restored after the persecutuion of all Witches in New England and the exjecting of the Devil.