n of the first century, as divinely revealed
truth, or to reject it, as degrading falsity. The reverend Principal
of King's College has delivered his judgment in perfectly clear and
candid terms. Two years since, Dr. Wace said that he believed the
story as it stands; and consequently he holds, as a part of divine
revelation, that the spiritual world comprises devils, who, under
certain circumstances, may enter men and be transferred from them to
four-footed beasts. For the distinguished Anglican Divine and Biblical
scholar, that is part and parcel of the teachings respecting the
spiritual world which we owe to the founder of Christianity. It is an
inseparable part of that Christian orthodoxy which, if a man rejects,
he is to be considered and called an "infidel." According to the
ordinary rules of interpretation of language, Mr. Gladstone must hold
the same view.

If antiquity and universality are valid tests of the truth of any
belief, no doubt this is one of the beliefs so certified. There are no
known savages, nor people sunk in the ignorance of partial
civilisation, who do not hold them. The great majority of Christians
have held them and still hold them. Moreover the oldest records we
possess of the early conceptions of mankind in Egypt and in
Mesopotamia prove that exactly such demonology, as is implied in the
Gadarene story, formed the substratum, and, among the early Accadians,
apparently the greater part, of their supposed knowledge of the
spiritual world. M. Lenormant's profoundly interesting work on
Babylonian magic and the magical texts given in the Appendix to
Professor Sayce's "Hibbert Lectures" leave no doubt on this head. They
prove that the doctrine of possession, and even the particular case of
pig, possession,[117] were firmly believed in by the Egyptians and the
Mesopotamians before the tribes of Israel invaded Palestine. And it is
evident that these beliefs, from some time after the exile and
probably much earlier, completely interpenetrated the Jewish mind, and
thus became inseparably interwoven with the fabric of the synoptic
Gospels.

Therefore, behind the question of the acceptance of the doctrines of
the oldest heathen demonology as part of the fundamental beliefs of
Christianity, there lies the question of the credibility of the
Gospels, and of their claim to act as our instructors, outside that
ethical province in which they appeal to the consciousness of all
thoughtful men. And still, beh