iptural basis of which
may not be whittled away by a similar process.

As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the New Testament
ask himself whether Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can
be dishonoured more grossly than by the supposition that they said
and did that which is attributed to them; while, in reality, they
disbelieved in Satan and his demons, in possession and in
exorcism?[87]

An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no right to
look at the propositions of the Christian faith with one eye open and
the other shut. (Tract 85, p. 29.) It really is not permissible to
see, with one eye, that Jesus is affirmed to declare the personality
and the Fatherhood of God, His loving providence and His accessibility
to prayer; and to shut the other to the no less definite teaching
ascribed to Jesus, in regard to the personality and the misanthropy of
the devil, his malignant watchfulness, and his subjection to
exorcistic formula and rites. Jesus is made to say that the devil "was
a murderer from the beginning" (John viii. 44) by the same authority
as that upon which we depend for his asserted declaration that "God is
a spirit" (John iv. 24).

To those who admit the authority of the famous Vincentian dictum that
the doctrine which has been held "always, everywhere, and by all" is
to be received as authoritative, the demonology must possess a higher
sanction than any other Christian dogma, except, perhaps, those of the
Resurrection and of the Messiahship of Jesus; for it would be
difficult to name any other points of doctrine on which the Nazarene
does not differ from the Christian, and the different historical
stages and contemporary subdivisions of Christianity from one another.
And, if the demonology is accepted, there can be no reason for
rejecting all those miracles in which demons play a part. The Gadarene
story fits into the general scheme of Christianity; and the evidence
for "Legion" and their doings is just as good as any other in the New
Testament for the doctrine which the story illustrates.

It was with the purpose of bringing this great fact into prominence;
of getting people to open both their eyes when they look at
Ecclesiasticism; that I devoted so much space to that miraculous story
which happens to be one of the best types of its class. And I could
not wish for a better justification of the course I have adopted, than
the fact that my heroically consistent advers