correcting them be unattainable; but errors arising from mere
carelessness are not to be pardoned. Further, in many of these cases of
supposed contradiction there is an element of carelessness indeed; but
it lies at the door of the critic, not of the author; and this appears
to be true in the present instance. The dilemma, as it presented itself
to the contemporary mind, must be carefully kept in view. Either the
spirits of the departed could revisit this world, or they could not. If
they could not, then the apparitions mistaken for them must be devils
assuming their forms. Now, the tendency of Hamlet's mind, immediately
before the great soliloquy on suicide, is decidedly in favour of the
latter alternative. The last words that he has uttered, which are also
the last quoted here,[1] are those in which he declares most forcibly
that he believes the devil-theory possible, and consequently that the
dead do not return to this world; and his utterances in his soliloquy
are only an accentuate and outcome of this feeling of uncertainty. The
very root of his desire for death is that he cannot discard with any
feeling of certitude the Protestant doctrine that no traveller does
after death return from the invisible world, and that the so-called
ghosts are a diabolic deception.

[Footnote 1: sec. 58, p. 59.]

60. Another power possessed by the evil spirits, and one that excited
much attention and created an immense amount of strife during
Elizabethan times, was that of entering into the bodies of human beings,
or otherwise influencing them so as utterly to deprive them of all
self-control, and render them mere automata under the command of the
fiends. This was known as possession, or obsession. It was another of
the mediaeval beliefs against which the reformers steadily set their
faces; and all the resources of their casuistry were exhausted to expose
its absurdity. But their position in this respect was an extremely
delicate one. On one side of them zealous Catholics were exorcising
devils, who shrieked out their testimony to the eternal truth of the
Holy Catholic Church; whilst at the same time, on the other side, the
zealous Puritans of the extremer sort were casting out fiends, who bore
equally fervent testimony to the superior efficacy and purity of the
Protestant faith. The tendency of the more moderate members of the
party, therefore was towards a compromise similar to that arrived at
upon the question how the devils cam