s in the middle of the choir, desperately shaking a clapperless
and soundless bell, whilst a priest, clad in ancient gold, was coming
and going before the altar, reciting prayers of which not a word was
heard.... Most certainly this was Dom Balaguere in the act of saying
his third low mass.

DEVIL-PUZZLERS[19]

BY FREDERICK BEECHER PERKINS

[19] By permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. New
York and London.

It will not do at all to disbelieve in the existence of a personal
devil. It is not so many years ago that one of our profoundest divines
remarked with indignation upon such disbelief. "No such person?" cried
the doctor with energy. "Don't tell me! I can hear his tail snap and
crack about amongst the churches any day!"

And if the enemy is, in truth, still as vigorously active among the
sons of God as he was in the days of Job (that is to say, in the time
of Solomon, when, as the critics have found out, the Book of Job was
written), then surely still more is he vigilant and sly in his tricks
for foreclosing his mortgages upon the souls of the wicked.

And once more: still more than ever is his personal appearance
probable in these latter days. The everlasting tooting of the wordy
Cumming has proclaimed the end of all things for a quarter of a
century; and he will surely see his prophecy fulfilled if he can only
keep it up long enough. But, though we discredit the sapient
Second-Adventist as to the precise occasion of the diabolic avatar,
has there not been a strange coincidence between his noisy
declarations, and other evidences of an approximation of the spiritual
to the bodily sphere of life? Is not this same quarter of a century
that of the Spiritists? Has it not witnessed the development of Od?
And of clairvoyance? And have not the doctrines of ghosts, and
re-appearances of the dead, and of messages from them, risen into a
prominence entirely new, and into a coherence and semblance at least
of fact and fixed law such as was never known before? Yea, verily. Of
all times in the world's history, to reject out of one's beliefs
either good spirits or bad, angelology or diabology, chief good being,
or chief bad being, this is the most improper.

Dr. Hicok was trebly liable to the awful temptation, under which he
had assuredly fallen, over and above the fact that he was a prig,
which makes one feel the more glad that he was so handsomely come up
with in the end; such a prig that everybo