y other
contained in that history. It is the well-known story of the devils
who were cast out of a man, and ordered, or permitted, to enter into a
herd of swine, to the great loss and damage of the innocent Gerasene,
or Gadarene, pig owners. There can be no doubt that the narrator
intends to convey to his readers his own conviction that this casting
out and entering in were effected by the agency of Jesus of Nazareth;
that, by speech and action, Jesus enforced this conviction; nor does
any inkling of the legal and moral difficulties of the case manifest
itself.

On the other hand, everything that I know of physiological and
pathological science leads me to entertain a very strong conviction
that the phenomena ascribed to possession are as purely natural as
those which constitute small-pox; everything that I know of
anthropology leads me to think that the belief in demons and
demoniacal possession is a mere survival of a once universal
superstition, and that its persistence, at the present time, is pretty
much in the inverse ratio of the general instruction, intelligence,
and sound judgment of the population among whom it prevails.
Everything that I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton
destruction of other people's property is a misdemeanour of evil
example. Again, the study of history, and especially of that of the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of
doubt on my mind that the belief in the reality of possession and of
witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and Protestants, upon
this and innumerable other passages in both the Old and New
Testaments, gave rise, through the special influence of Christian
ecclesiastics, to the most horrible persecutions and judicial murders
of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children. And
when I reflect that the record of a plain and simple declaration upon
such an occasion as this, that the belief in witchcraft and possession
is wicked nonsense, would have rendered the long agony of mediaeval
humanity impossible, I am prompted to reject, as dishonouring, the
supposition that such declaration was withheld out of condescension to
popular error.

"Come forth, thou unclean spirit, out of the man" (Mark v. 8),[55] are
the words attributed to Jesus. If I declare, as I have no hesitation
in doing, that I utterly disbelieve in the existence of "unclean
spirits," and, consequently, in the possibility of their "coming
fo