tions and inaccuracies which it
may be a duty, nay, even an innocent pleasure, to expose. In the
particular case of which I am thinking, I felt, as Strauss says, "able
and called upon" to undertake the business: and it is no
responsibility of mine, if I found the Gospels, with their miraculous
stories, of which the Gadarene is a typical example, blocking my way,
as heretofore, the Pentateuch had done.

I was challenged to question the authority for the theory of "the
spiritual world," and the practical consequences deducible from human
relations to it, contained in these documents.

In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world--the value of
the evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the
course of things--are matters, which lie as much within the province
of science, as any other question about the existence and powers of
the varied forms of living and conscious activity.

It really is my strong conviction that a man has no more right to say
he believes this world is haunted by swarms of evil spirits, without
being able to produce satisfactory evidence of the fact, than he has a
right to say, without adducing adequate proof, that the circumpolar
antarctic ice swarms with sea-serpents. I should not like to assert
positively that it does not. I imagine that no cautious biologist
would say as much; but while quite open to conviction, he might
properly decline to waste time upon the consideration of talk, no
better accredited than forecastle "yarns," about such monsters of the
deep. And if the interests of ordinary veracity dictate this course,
in relation to a matter of so little consequence as this, what must be
our obligations in respect of the treatment of a question which is
fundamental alike for science and for ethics? For not only does our
general theory of the universe and of the nature of the order which
pervades it, hang upon the answer; but the rules of practical life
must be deeply affected by it.

The belief in a demonic world is inculcated throughout the Gospels and
the rest of the books of the New Testament; it pervades the whole
patristic literature; it colours the theory and the practice of every
Christian church down to modern times. Indeed, I doubt if, even now,
there is any church which, officially, departs from such a fundamental
doctrine of primitive Christianity as the existence, in addition to
the Cosmos with which natural knowledge is conversant, of a world of
spiri