e applied to the explanation of the causation of
disease, the _demon theories_ inherited from Egypt, Persia, and the
East. The Bible itself reflects the views on demonology current at the
time of the events recorded. If demons were the cause of disease,
logically the treatment of diseases should have been in the hands of
priests, not of physicians. The priests held that they were the proper
people to interpret the will of the Almighty; diseases were direct
dispensations of Providence.

"It is demons," says Origen, "which produce famine, unfruitfulness,
corruptions of the air, and pestilence. They hover concealed in clouds,
in the lower atmosphere, and are attracted by the blood and incense
which the heathen offer to them as gods."[38] "All diseases of
Christians," wrote Augustine, "are to be ascribed to these demons:
chiefly do they torment fresh-baptized Christians, yea! even the
guiltless new-born infants." Hippocrates, long before the Christian era,
wrote with great wisdom in reference to the so-called sacred diseases:
"To me it appears that such affections are just as much divine as all
others are, and that no one disease is either more divine or more human
than another; but all are alike divine, for each has its own nature, and
no one arises without a natural cause."[39]

The devil might be driven out in disgust, it was thought, by the use of
disgusting materials--ordure, the grease made from executed criminals,
the livers of toads, the blood of rats, and so on. The same belief in
demoniacal possession led to the most inhuman treatment of lunatics, and
the Church in this respect is put to shame when we compare its action
with the wiser and more humane practice of the Moors. This belief helped
to strangle medical progress for centuries, and is directly attributable
to the Church. As late as 1583, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna boasted
that they had cast out 12,642 devils. That God dispenses both health and
disease is a very different belief from that involved in "demoniacal
possession." Travellers in remote parts of the East at the present day
tell of alleged cases of demoniacal possession, but investigation does
not reveal any difference between these cases and epilepsy or acute
mania.

In the first centuries of the Christian era men demanded overt signs of
the favour of God, and the objects of veneration kept in the churches
and monasteries were held to be capable of curing disease. The Latin
Church had either a