For love of thy love I do this, recalling in the bitterness of self-examination my wicked ways, that thou mayest grow sweet to me, thou sweetness without deception!
Warner, Will and Major, according to Tanner's account of them, were melon-stealing, Sabbath-breaking niggers, and not approving of such wickedness, he felt it his duty to put them in the stocks.
This shows up in a different context involving exorcisms where many belief systems allow for the idea that people's behavior, particularly their evil or irrational behavior, could be because something else has taken over their bodies.