d Professor Huxley adds:

"No one deserves much blame for being deceived in these matters. We are
all intellectually handicapped in youth by the incessant repetition of
the stories about possession and witchcraft in both the Old and the New
Testaments. The majority of us are taught nothing which will help us to
observe accurately and to interpret observations with due caution."

The English Statute Book under Elizabeth and under James was disfigured
by enactments against witchcraft passed under pressure from the
Christian churches, which Acts have only been repealed in consequence of
the disbelief in the Christian precept, "thou shaft not suffer a witch
to live". The statute 1 James I, c. 12, condemned to death "all
persons invoking any evil spirits, or consulting, covenanting with,
entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit", or
generally practising any "infernal arts". This was not repealed until
the eighteenth century was far advanced. Edison's phonograph would 280
years ago have insured martyrdom for its inventor; the utilisation of
electric force to transmit messages around the world would have been
clearly the practice of an infernal art. At least we may plead that
unbelief has healed the bleeding feet of science, and made the road free
for her upward march.

Is it not also fair to urge the gain to humanity which has been apparent
in the wiser treatment of the insane, consequent on the unbelief in
the Christian doctrine that these unfortunates were examples either of
demoniacal possession or of special visitation of deity? For centuries
under Christianity mental disease was most ignorantly treated. Exorcism,
shackles, and the whip were the penalties rather than the curatives for
mental maladies. From the heretical departure of Pinel at the close
of the last century to the position of Maudsley to-day, every step
illustrates the march of unbelief. Take the gain to humanity in the
unbelief not yet complete, but now largely preponderant, in the dogma
that sickness, pestilence, and famine were manifestations of divine
anger, the results of which could neither be avoided nor prevented.
The Christian Churches have done little or nothing to dispel this
superstition. The official and authorised prayers of the principal
denominations, even to-day, reaffirm it. Modern study of the laws of
health, experiments in sanitary improvements, more careful applications
of medical knowledge, have proved more effic