LITMIR.BIZ

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their citation here. But not only did Christianity thus inherit the long-prevalent superstition, but it transmitted it intact to succeeding ages; and there can be no doubt that this demonology, with its consequent and inevitable belief in witchcraft, sorcery, and magic, continued so long to prevail throughout Christendom, as much through the authority of the sacred writings and the teaching of the Church as through the superstitious ignorance of Europe.

      It would be impossible to select for illustration any type of the Gospel miracles, whose fundamental principle—belief in the reality, malignant action, and power of demons, and in the power of man to control them—has received fuller or more permanent living acceptance from posterity, down to very recent times, than the cure of disease ascribed to demoniacal influence. The writings of the Fathers are full of the belief; the social history of Europe teems with it. The more pious the people, the more firm was their conviction of its reality. From times antecedent to Christianity, until medical science slowly came into existence and displaced miracle cures by the relics of saints, every form of disease was ascribed to demons. Madness, idiotcy, epilepsy, and every shape of hysteria were the commonest forms of their malignity; and the blind, the dumb, and the deformed were regarded as unquestionable victims of their malice. Every domestic calamity, from the convulsions of a child to the death of a cow, was unhesitatingly attributed to their agency. The more ignorant the community, the greater the number of its possessed. Belief in the power of sorcery, witchcraft, and magic was inherent in the superstition, and the universal prevalence shows how catholic was the belief in demoniacal influence. The practice of these arts is solemnly denounced as sin in the New Testament and throughout Patristic literature, and the church has in all ages fulminated against it. No accusation was more common than that of practising sorcery, and no class escaped from the fatal suspicion. Popes were charged with the crime, and bishops were found guilty of it. St. Cyprian was said to have been a magician before he became a Christian and a Father of the Church.(1) Athanasius was accused of sorcery before the Synod of Tyre.(2) Not only the illiterate but even the learned, in the estimation of their age, believed in it. No heresy was ever persecuted with more unrelenting hatred. Popes have issued bulls vehemently anathematising witches and sorcerers, councils have proscribed them, ecclesiastical courts have consigned tens of thousands of persons suspected of being such to the stake, monarchs have written treatises against them and invented tortures for their conviction, and every nation in Europe and almost every generation have passed the most stringent laws against them. Upon no point has there ever been greater unanimity of belief. Church and State have vied with each other for the suppression of the abominable crime. Every phenomenon of nature, every unwelcome occurrence of social life, as well as every natural disease, has been ascribed to magic and demons. The historical records of Europe are filled with the deliberate trial and conviction, upon what was deemed evidence, of thousands of sorcerers and witches. Hundreds have been found guilty of exercising demoniacal influence over the elements, from Sopater the philosopher, executed under Constantino for preventing, by adverse winds, the arrival of corn ships at Constantinople, to Dr. Fian and other witches horribly tortured and burnt for causing a stormy passage on the return of James I. from Denmark.(1) Thousands of men and tens of thousands of women have been done to death by every conceivable torment for causing sickness or calamity by sorcery, or for flying through the air to attend the witches' sabbath. When scepticism as to the reality of the demoniacal powers of sorcery tardily began to arise, it was fiercely reprobated by the Church as infidelity. Even so late as the 17th century, a man like Sir Thomas Browne not only did not include the belief amongst the vulgar errors which he endeavoured to expose, but on the contrary wrote: "For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know that there are

      1 Pitcairn's Criminal Trials of Scotland, i. pp. 213, 223.

      witches. They that doubt of them, do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely, and upon consequence, a sort not of infidels, but atheists."(1) In 1664 Sir Thomas Hale, in passing sentence of death against two women convicted of being witches, declared that the reality of witchcraft was undeniable, because "first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; and secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime."(2) Even the 18th century was stained with the blood of persons tortured and executed for sorcery.

      Notwithstanding all this persistent and unanimous confirmation, we ask again: What has now become of the belief in demoniacal possession and sorcery? It has utterly disappeared. "Joseph Mede, Lardner, Dr. Mead, Paley, and all the learned modern writers" with Dean Milinan, as we have seen, explain it away, and such a theory of disease and elemental disturbance is universally recognized to have been a groundless superstition. The countless number of persons tormented and put to death for the supposed crime of witchcraft and sorcery were mere innocent victims to ignorance and credulity. Mr. Buckle has collected a mass of evidence to show that "there is in every part of the world an intimate relation between ignorance respecting the nature and proper treating of a disease, and the belief that such disease is caused by supernatural power, and is to be cured by it."(1) At the commencement of our era every disease was ascribed to the agency of demons simply because the nature of disease was not understood, and the writers of the Gospels were not, in this respect, one whit more enlightened than the Jews. The progress of science, however, has not only dispelled the superstitious theory as regards disease in our time; its effects are retrospective. Science not only declares the ascription of disease to demoniacal possession or malignity to be an idle superstition now, but it equally repudiates the assumption of such a cause at any time. The diseases referred by the Gospels, and by the Jews of that time, to the action of devils, exist now, but they are known to proceed from purely physical causes. The same superstition and medical ignorance would enunciate the same diagnosis at the present day. The superstition and ignorance, however, have passed away, and with them the demoniacal theory. In that day the theory was as baseless as in this. This is the logical conclusion of every educated man.

      It is obvious that, with the necessary abandonment of the theory of "possession" and demoniacal origin of disease, the largest class of miracles recorded in the Gospels is at once exploded. The asserted cause of the diseases of this class, said to have been miraculously healed, must be recognized to be a mere vulgar superstition, and the narratives of such miracles, ascribing as they do in perfect simplicity distinct objectivity to the supposed "possessing" demons, and reporting their very words and actions, at once assume the character of mere imaginative and fabulous writings based upon superstitious tradition, and cannot be accepted as the sober and intelligent report of eye-witnesses. We shall presently see how far this.inference is supported by the literary evidence regarding the date and composition of the Gospels.

      The deduction, however, does not end here. It is clear that, this large class of Gospel miracles being due to the superstition of an ignorant and credulous age, the insufficiency of the evidence for any of the other supposed miraculous occurrences narrated in the same documents becomes at once apparent. Nothing but the most irrefragable testimony could possibly warrant belief in statements of supernatural events which contradict all experience, and are opposed to all science. When these statements, however, are not only rendered, à priori, suspicious by their proceeding from a period of the grossest superstition and credulity, but it becomes evident that a considerable part of them is due solely to that superstition and credulity, by which, moreover, the rest may likewise be most naturally explained, it is obvious that they cannot stand against the opposing conviction of invariable experience. The force of the testimony is gone. We are far from using this language in an offensive sense concerning the Gospel narratives, which, by the simple faith of the writers, present the most noble aspect of the occurrences of which superstition is capable. Indeed, viewed as compositions gradually rising out of pious tradition, and representing the best spirit of their times, the Gospels, even in ascribing such miracles to Jesus, are a touching illustration of the veneration excited by his elevated character. Devout enthusiasm surrounded his memory with the tradition of the highest exhibitions of power within the range of Jewish imagination, and that these conceptions represent merely an idealized form of prevalent superstition was not only natural but inevitable. We shall hereafter fully examine the character of the Gospels, but it will be sufficient here to point out that none of these writings lays claim to any special inspiration, or in the slightest degree pretends to be more than a human composition,(1) and subject to the errors of human history.

      2.

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