Parts II and III introduce the Puritans who built Massachusetts Bay as a “city on a hill,” a model godly society meant to inspire the world. Their theology centered on covenant and predestination, with church, marriage, and community all understood as binding covenants before God. They rejected most secular amusements, saw the supernatural as ever present, and prized self-discipline and communal duty. At the same time, they created unusually democratic church structures, fostered high literacy for both men and women so that everyone could read scripture, and built institutions like Boston Latin School and Harvard to train an educated clergy and governing elite.Against that backdrop, Massachusetts slid into a profound crisis that touched religion, war, politics, and the law. The Halfway Covenant exposed deep anxieties about declining zeal in a prosperous, commercializing colony. Back-to-back Indian wars and frontier massacres, fought against Native peoples seen as Satan’s agents and their French Catholic allies, traumatized New England and flooded places like Salem with refugees. The revocation of the original charter, the unpopular Dominion of New England, and a legal vacuum after the Glorious Revolution left courts in disarray and revived a harsher English witchcraft statute just as fear and factionalism were peaking. Into this unstable landscape stepped towering ministers like Increase and Cotton Mather, whose authority and earlier involvement in suspected witchcraft cases helped frame a world where Satan’s presence felt immediate, and where a full-blown witch panic in 1692 became thinkable.