Satanic agency, demoniacal possession, and
witchcraft, to Milton's receptacle of exploded follies and detected
impostures,

"Over the backside of the world far off,
Into a limbo broad and large, and called
The paradise of fools,"--

that indeed, out of their peculiar province, and apart from the routine
of their vocation, they have become the most thorough sceptics and
unbelievers among us. Yet it must be owned that, if they have not the
marvellous themselves, they are the cause of it in others. In certain
states of mind, the very sight of a clergyman in his sombre professional
garb is sufficient to awaken all the wonderful within us. Imagination
goes wandering back to the subtle priesthood of mysterious Egypt. We
think of Jannes and Jambres; of the Persian magi; dim oak groves, with
Druid altars, and priests, and victims, rise before us. For what is the
priest even of our New England but a living testimony to the truth of the
supernatural and the reality of the unseen,--a man of mystery, walking in
the shadow of the ideal world,--by profession an expounder of spiritual
wonders? Laugh he may at the old tales of astrology and witchcraft and
demoniacal possession; but does he not believe and bear testimony to his
faith in the reality of that dark essence which Scripture more than hints
at, which has modified more or less all the religious systems and
speculations of the heathen world,--the Ahriman of the Parsee, the Typhon
of the Egyptian, the Pluto of the Roman mythology, the Devil of Jew,
Christian, and Mussulman, the Machinito of the Indian,--evil in the
universe of goodness, darkness in the light of divine intelligence,--in
itself the great and crowning mystery from which by no unnatural process
of imagination may be deduced everything which our forefathers believed
of the spiritual world and supernatural agency? That fearful being with
his tributaries and agents,--"the Devil and his angels,"--how awfully he
rises before us in the brief outline limning of the sacred writers! How
he glooms, "in shape and gesture proudly eminent," on the immortal canvas
of Milton and Dante! What a note of horror does his name throw into the
sweet Sabbath psalmody of our churches. What strange, dark fancies are
connected with the very language of common-law indictments, when grand
juries find under oath that the offence complained of has been committed
"at the instigation of the Devi