was so little an innocuous one, that might have been safely left to drop naturally away, was, on the contrary, one which reached so far in its consequences, entwined its roots so deeply among the very groundtruths of religion, that it could never have been suffered to remain at the hazard of all the misgrowths which it must needs have occasioned.

And then, moreover, even had not the matters at stake been so important, our idea of Christ's absolute veracity, apart from the value of the truth which he communicated, our idea of him as the Verax, no less than the Verus and the Veritas, will not permit us to suppose that he used the language which he did, well knowing that there was no answerable thing, on which the language was founded. And in this there is no making a conscience about gnats, nor denying that figurative nature of all our words, out of which it results that much which is not literally true, is yet most true, inasmuch as it conveys the truest impression,-no requiring men to look into the derivations of their words before they venture to use them. It had been one thing for the Lord to have fallen in with the popular language, and to have spoken of persons under various natural afflictions as "possessed," supposing he had found such a language current, but now no longer, however once it might have been, vividly linked to the idea of possession by spirits of evil. This had been no more than our speaking of certain forms of madness as lunacy; not thereby implying that we believe the moon to have, or to have had, any influence upon them;* but finding the word, we use it: and this the more readily, since its original derivation is so entirely lost sight of in our common conversation, its first impress so completely worn off, that we do not thereby even seem to countenance an error. But suppose with this same disbelief in lunar influences, we were to begin to speak not merely of lunatics, but of persons on whom the moon was working, to describe the cure of such, as the moon's ceasing to afflict them; or if a physician were solemnly to address the moon, bidding it to abstain from harming his patient, there would be here a passing over into quite a different region; we should be here directly countenancing superstition and delusion; and plainly speaking untruly with our lips; there would be that gulf be tween our thoughts and our words, in which the essence of a lie consists. Now Christ does every where speak in such a language as this. Take, for instance, his words, Luke xi. 17-26, and assume him as knowing, all the while he was thus speaking, that the whole Jewish

* There are cases of lunambulism, in which no doubt it has influence; but they are few and exceptional. (See SCHUBERT, p. 113.) I am speaking of using the term to express all forms of mental unsoundness.

theory of demoniac possessions was utterly baseless, that there was no power of the kind which Satan exercised over the spirits of men, and what should we have here for a king of truth?

And then, besides this, the phenomena themselves are such as no theory of the kind avails to explain, and they thus bid us to seek for some more satisfying solution. For that madness was not the constituent element in the demoniac state is clear, since not only we have not the slightest ground for supposing that the Jews would have considered all maniacs, epileptic or melancholic persons, to be under the power of evil spirits: but we have distinct evidence that the same malady they did sometimes attribute to an evil spirit, and sometimes not, thus showing that the malady and possession were not identical in their eyes, and that the assumption of the latter was not a mere popular explanation for the presence of the former. Thus, on two occasions they bring to the Lord those that were dumb, (Matt. ix. 32; xii. 22; on the second occasion it is one dumb and blind;) and in each of these cases the dumbness is traced up to an evil spirit. Yet it is plain that they did not consider all dumbness as having this root; for in the history given by St. Mark, (vii. 32,) of one deaf and dumb, that was the subject of Christ's healing power, it is the evident intention of the Evangelist to describe one laboring only under a natural defect; there is not the slightest appearance there of a desire to trace the source of his malady to any demoniacal influence. There were no doubt signs which were sufficiently distinct by which the different sources of the same defect were capable of being known: in the case of the demoniac there probably was not the outward hindrance, not the still-fastened string of the tongue; it was not the outward organ, but the inward power of using the organ, which was at fault. This, with an entire apathy, a total disregard of all which was going on about him, may have sufficiently indicated that the cause of his malady lay deeper than on the surface. But, whatever may have been the signs which enabled those about the sufferers to make these distinctions, the fact itself that they did so discriminate between cases of the very same malady, proves decisively that there were not certain diseases which, without more ado, they attributed directly to Satan: but that they did designate by this name of possession, a condition which, while it was very often a condition of disease, was also always a condition of much more than disease.

But what was the condition which our Lord and his apostles signalized by this name? in what did it differ, upon the one side, from madness,-upon the other, from wickedness? It will be impossible to make any advance toward the answer, without saying something, by way of preface, on the scriptural doctrine concerning the kingdom of evil, and

its personal head, and the relation in which he stands to the moral evil of our world. Alike excluding, on the one side, the Manichæan doctrine, which would make evil eternal as good, and so itself a god,-and the pantheistic, which would deny any true reality to evil at all, or that it is any thing else than good at a lower stage, the unripe and therefore still bitter fruit,—the Scripture teaches the absolute subordination of evil to good, and its subsequence of order, in the fact that the evil roots itself in a creature, and one created originally pure, but the good in the Creator. Yet, at the same time, it teaches that the opposition of this evil to the will of God is most real, is that of a will which does truly set itself against his will; that the world is not a chess-board on which God is in fact playing both sides of the game, however some of the pieces may be black and some white; but that the whole end of his government of the world is the subduing of this evil; that is, not abolishing it by main force, which were no true victory, but overcoming it by righteousness and truth. And from this one central will, alienated from the will of God, the Scripture derives all the evil in the universe; all gathers up in a person, the devil, who has most truly a kingdom, as God has, a kingdom with its subordinate ministers," the devil and his angels."* This world of ours stands not isolated, not rounded and

* The devil, the central power of evil, is never in Scripture called daiμwv or Sapóviov, nor yet, on the other hand, his inferior ministers diaẞohoí. In regard of the words dauóviov and daíuwv, the first is in the New Testament of far the most frequent occurrence, being used sixty times, while daíuwv occurs but five times. The words are not perhaps perfectly equivalent; but there is more of personality implied in daíuw than δαιμόνιον. Other terms are πνεῦμα πονηρόν, πνεῦμα ἀκαθάρτον, πνεῦμα δαιμονίου ȧkabúρrov, and at Matt. viii. 16, they are simply тà пνεúμата. The word daíuov ( : Sanov) is either derived from dúw, scio, and then signifies "the knowing," the full of insight, (in oldest Greek dáμwv,) while to know is the special prerogative of spiritual beings; (ob scientiam nominati, AUGUSTINE, De Civ. Dei, 1. 9, c. 20; as our English "witch" is perhaps from wissen, to know;) or else from daíw, in its sense of to divide; the daíuoves are then the distributors, the dividers and allotters of good and of evil to men, and daiμwv would thus be very much the same as Moīpa, derived from μépos, a portion. And this derivation has its superiority in that ever a feeling of the fateful is linked with the word. Thus, the man to whom the epithet dapóvios is applied, is one under an especial leading of the higher powers, whether that leading is to glory or to destruction. In classic use the word is of much wider sig nificance than in scriptural, embracing all intermediate beings between men and the very highest divinities, whether the deified men of the golden age, or created and inferior powers; and, as well as dauóvios, is a middle term, capable of being applied to the highest and the lowest, and first deriving from its adjunct a good or an evil significance; thus we have dyabodaíμwv, kakodaíuov. Yet Augustine (De Civ. Dei, 1. 59, c. 19) observes, that in his time even among heathens the word had come to be used only in malem partem, which he attributes to the influence which the Church

complete in itself, but in living relation with two worlds,-a higher, from which all good in it proceeds,-and this lower, from which all evil. Thus man's sin is continually traced up to Satan; Peter says to Ananias, "Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?" (Acts v. 3;) and St. John, of Judas Iscariot, "The devil having now put into his heart to betray him," (John xiii. 3; cf. 1 John iii. 8; John viii. 44,) the Scripture not thereby denying that the evil of men is truly their evil, but affirming with this, that it has its ground in a yet higher evil. It is their evil, since it is an act of their will which alone gives it leave to enter. To each man the key is committed and the task given to keep closed the gate of his soul by which the enemy would enter. But it is also true that it is the existence of another world, of evil beyond and without our world, which makes all remissness here of such fatal and disastrous issue.

This being so, the question which presents itself is this, namely, what peculiar form of the working of these dark powers of hell Scripture designates by this title of demoniacal possessions. We have not here merely great sufferers; we have not in the demoniacs, as in the case of the victims of ghastly and horrible diseases, only specimens of the mighty woe which Satan has brought in upon our race through that sin common unto all; although we have such most truly. Nor yet, on the other hand, have we merely signal sinners, eminent servants of the devil, who with heart and will and waking consciousness are doing his work; for this, whatever their antecedent guilt may have been, and often, I should imagine, it had been great, the demoniacs evidently are not. But what strikes us most in them is the strange blending of the physical and the spiritual; the two regions are not kept separate; there is a breaking up of all the harmony of the lower, no less than of the higher life; the same disorder and disorganization manifests itself in both. This too is worthy of notice, that the demoniac does not, like the wicked, stand only in near relation to the kingdom of Satan as a whole; but his state is even as if out of the dark hosts of the abyss, one, or, it may be, more, had singled him out for their immediate prey; as when a lion or a leopard, not hunting merely a herd of flying antelopes, has fastened upon and is drinking out the life-blood of some one.

But how had this come to pass? how had men sunken into this woful state? been suffered to be entangled so far in the bands of the devil, or so fallen under the dominion of one or more of his angels? Now we should err, no doubt, and get altogether upon a wrong track, if

use of the word only in that sense, had spread even beyond its own limits. On the Greek idea of the daíuoves, see Creuzer's masterly discussion, (Symbolik, part 3, pp. 719-748, 3rd edit.,) and SOLGER'S Nachgelassene Schriften. v. 2, pp. 657—675.

we were to conceive of the demoniacs as the worst of men, and their possession as the plague and penalty of a wickedness in which they had eminently surpassed their fellows. Rather we must judge the demoniac one of the unhappiest, but not of necessity one of the most guilty, of our kind.* On the contrary, the most eminent representatives and organs of Satan, false prophets and antichrists, are never spoken of in this language. We all feel that Judas's possession, when Satan entered into him, (John xiii. 27,) was specifically different from that of one of the unhappy persons whom Christ came to deliver. Or, to borrow an illustration from the world of fiction, we should not speak of lago as Samovióuevos, however all the deadliest malignity of hell was concentrated in him; much more nearly we should find analogies to this state in some moments of Hamlet's life. The Greek poet will supply us with a yet apter example; it is the noble Orestes, whom the "dogs of hell" torture into madness; the obdurate Clytemnestra is troubled on account of her deed with no such spectres of the unseen world. Thus, too, in

*This is exactly Heinroth's exaggeration, tracing up, as he does, insanity in every case to foregoing sin; and not this alone, but affirming, that none who had not fallen deeply away from God could be liable to this infliction, that in fact they are those who have fallen from him the most utterly, the outermost circle of them who have obeyed the centrifugal impulses of sin. But every one who knows what manner of persons have been visited by this terrible calamity, and also what manner of persons have not, at once revolts against this doctrine stated in this breadth and thus without qualification. Yet, at the same time, his unquestionable merit remains, that more distinctly, I believe, than any other had yet done, he dared to say out that such cases were to be looked at as standing in a different, and oftentimes far nearer, connection to the kingdom of evil than a fever or a broken limb. The mere fact that the treatment of insanity is more and more allowed on all sides to be a moral treatment, and the physical remedies to be merely subsidiary to this, that almost alone out of this its removal may be hoped, should be alone sufficient to put it in wholly another class from every other disease. The attempt to range it with them is merely the attempt natural enough in those who know not the grace of God in Christ, to avoid looking down into the awful deeps of our fallen nature. For a list of Heinroth's works, almost all bearing upon this subject, see the Conversations-Lexicon in the article on his name. In speaking on such a subject he had the inestimable advantage of being at once a theologian and physician. For Schubert's more qualified opinion on the same subject, see his Krankheiten und Störungen der menschlichen Seele, p. 37.

So the accusation of the people, "Thou hast a devil," (John vii. 20; viii. 48, 52; x. 20,) was quite different from, and betrayed infinitely less deadly malignity than, that of the Pharisees, that he cast out devils by Beelzebub. (Matt. xii. 24.) That first was a common coarse blasphemy, a stone flung at random; this, which charged him with being in willing alliance with the prince of evil, was on the very verge of being the sin against the Holy Ghost (ver. 31). The distinction between the wicked and the demoniac was clearly recognized by the early Church; it its excommu nications for the first, its exorcists for the last.