As the play unfolds, however, the audience is subtly brought into the grip of an awful evil which grows with ominously gathering power and soon engulfs the community. Everyone in Salem, saint and sinner alike, is swept up by it. It is like a mysterious epidemic which, starting first with Abigail and Parris, spreads inexorably with a dreadfully growing virulence through the whole town until all have been infected by it. It grows terribly and unavoidably in power and leaves in its wake a trail of misery, moral disintegration, and destruction. The audience leaves the play under a spell, It is the kind of spell which the exposure to spirit in its living active manifestation always evokes.

If one asks about this play, what it is that comes upon this community and works within it with such terrible power, there is no better answer to give than ``spirit.'' This is not to attempt to say what spirit is, but only to employ a commonly used word to designate or simply identify a common experience. In the end the good man, John Proctor, expresses what the audience has already come to feel when he says, ``A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face!'' The tragic irony of the play is that the very belief in and concern with a devil who could be met in the woods and combatted with formulae set out in books was the very thing that prevented them from detecting the real devil when he came among them. We marvel at their blindness for not seeing this. Yet are not we of the mid twentieth century, who rightly do not believe there is any such ``thing'' as the devil, just as bad off as they -- only in a different way? In our disbelief we think that we can no longer even use the word and so are unable to even name the elemental power which is so vividly real in this play. We are left helpless to cope with it because we do not dare speak of it as anything real for fear that to do so would imply a commitment to that which has already been discredited and proved false.