ck of Holy Scripture_. "I am afraid," he says, in
a letter to the Rev. J. W. Belcher, "that the objections to demoniacal
possession involve in germ the rejection of all belief in the
supernatural." This is wonderfully clear and straightforward for the
Grand Old Man. Give up the belief that mad people may be tenanted by
devils, and you should immediately join the National Secular Society.
You have taken the first decisive step on the broad road of
"infidelity," and nothing but a want of logic or courage prevents you
from hastening to the inevitable conclusion.

Archbishop Trench, in his _Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord_, rejects
the theory that the "demoniacs" were simply insane. No doubt, he says,
there was "a substratum of disease, which in many cases helped to
lay open the sufferer to the deeper evil." But "our Lord Himself uses
language which is not reconcileable" with the naturalist theory. "It
may well be a question moreover," says Trench, "if an Apostle, or one
with apostolic discernment of spirits, were to enter now into one of
our madhouses, how many of the sufferers there he might not recognise as
thus having more immediately fallen under the tyranny of the powers of
darkness."

Dean Milman, the discreet, plausible, and polished historian of the
Christian superstition, did not shrink from regarding the New Testament
demoniacs as merely insane; and "nothing was more probable," he
remarked, "than that lunacy should take the turn and speak the language
of the prevailing superstition of the times." Precisely so. But why did
Jesus imitate the lunatics? He addresses the evil spirit and not the
madman. "Hold thy peace," he says, "and come out of him." No doubt
the demoniacs were simply insane; but in that case Jesus himself was
mistaken, or the evangelists put into his mouth words that he never
used. The first alternative destroys the divinity of Jesus; the second
destroys the authority of the evangelists.

Mr. Gladstone's position is the only honest and logical one for a
professed Christian. Demonic possession cannot be cut out of the New
Testament without leaving a gap through which all the "infidelity" in
the world might pass freely. Devils are not confined to hell. They
are commercial travellers in brimstone and mischief. They go home
occasionally; the rest of the time they are abroad on business. When
they see a promising madman they get inside him, and find warmer
quarters than the universal air. Very likel