dead should be permitted to
return to earth, under circumstances the most grotesque, to support
the doctrines of masses for the dead, purgatory and propitiatory
penance; that demons should be exorcised to give testimony to the
merits of rival orders of monks and friars; that relics, many of them
supposititious, and many of the most disgusting and blasphemous
character, should have power to affect the eternal state of the
departed; and that _all_ saints, angels, demons, and the ghosts of the
departed, should support, with great variations indeed, the corrupt
dealings of a corrupt priesthood--form a creed worthy of the darkest
and most unworthy days of heathenism.

There is, however, one excuse, or rather palliation, for the
superstition of that time. In periods of great public depravity--and
few epochs have been more depraved than that in which Calmet
lived--Satan has great power. With a ruler like the regent Duke of
Orleans, with a Church governor like Cardinal Dubois, it would appear
that the civil and ecclesiastical authority of France had sold itself,
like Ahab of old, to work wickedness; or, as the apostle says, "to
work all uncleanness with greediness." In an age so characterized, it
does not seem at all improbable that portentous events should from
time to time occur; that the servants of the devil should be
strengthened together with their master; that many should be given
over to strong delusions and to believe a lie; and that the evil part
of the invisible world should be permitted to ally itself more closely
with the men of an age so congenial. Real cases of demoniacal
possession might, perhaps, be met with, and though scarcely amenable
to the exorcisms of a clergy so corrupt as that of France in that day,
they would yet justify a belief in the reality of those cases got up
for the sake of filthy lucre, personal ambition, or private revenge.
If the public mind was prepared for a belief in such cases, there were
not wanting men to turn it to profitable account; and the quiet
student who believed the efficacy of the means used, and was scarcely
aware of the wickedness of the age in which he lived, might easily be
induced to credit the tales told him of demons expelled by the power
of a church, to which in the beginning an authority to do so had
undoubtedly been given, and whose awful corruptions were to him at
least greatly veiled.

Calmet was a man of great integrity and considerable acumen, but he
passed a