es, they have nothing to do with
prayers. If they are good people, who died in a state of grace, they
may require prayers to take them out of purgatory; but can that be
said of the spectres spoken of by Pliny and Lucian? It is the devil,
who sports with the simplicity of men? Is it not ascribing to him most
excessive power, by making him the author of all these apparitions,
which we conceive he cannot cause without the permission of God? And
we can still less imagine that God will concur in the deceptions and
illusions of the demon. There is then reason to believe that all the
apparitions of this kind, and all these stories, are false, and must
be absolutely rejected, as more fit to keep up the superstition and
idle credulity of the people than to edify and instruct them.

Footnotes:

[316] Thyraei Demoniaci cum locis infestis.

[317] S. Aug. de Civ. lib. xxii. 8.

[318] S. Greg. Mag. Dial. cap. 39.

[319] Alexander ab Alexandro, lib. v. 23.

[320] Causes Celebres, tom. xi. p. 374.

[321] Mem. de Cardinal de Retz, tom. i. pp. 43, 44

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PRODIGIOUS EFFECTS OF IMAGINATION IN THOSE MEN OR WOMEN WHO BELIEVE
THEY HOLD INTERCOURSE WITH THE DEMON.

As soon as we admit it as a principle that angels and demons are
purely spiritual substances, we must consider, not only as chimerical
but also as impossible, all personal intercourse between a demon and a
man, or a woman, and consequently regard as the effect of a depraved
or deranged imagination all that is related of demons, whether incubi
or succubi, and of the _ephialtes_ of which such strange tales are
told.

The author of the Book of Enoch, which is cited by the fathers, and
regarded as canonical Scripture by some ancient writers, has taken
occasion, from these words of Moses,[322] "The children of God, seeing
the daughters of men, who were of extraordinary beauty, took them for
wives, and begat the giants of them," of setting forth that the
angels, smitten with love for the daughters of men, wedded them, and
had by them children, which are those giants so famous in
antiquity.[323] Some of the ancient fathers have thought that this
irregular love of the angels was the cause of their fall, and that
till then they had remained in the just and due subordination which
they owed to their Creator.

It appears from Josephus that the Jews of his day seriously
believed[324] that the angels were subject to these weaknesses like
men. St. Justin