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as already remarked, we have the boy who, in Matt. xvii. 15, is said to be sore vexed," and whom, in Mark, ix. 20, “the spirit tare," and out of whom the daimon, after having been rebuked by Jesus, departed, Matt. xvii. 18-this same boy is, in Matt. xvii. 15, called by his father, expressly, a "lunatic," or person afflicted with an affection depending on lunar influence, and immediately afterwards is described as being "cured." Again, we find the two ideas of the daimon and madness identified in John, x. 20— "He hath a daimon, and is mad." And the difficulty of this language, which may to a European appear strange, and to present, as one, two utterly different ideas, receives its full solution in the East, where the identification between daimon-action and madnessand, indeed, all cerebral, nervous, and anomalous disease-is rooted in the popular mind, and has for centuries maintained the schools of medical exorcism presided over by the Bhuktus. And lest any one should contend that this distinction between the two terms, which our translation has confounded, is not one of character, as we maintain, but merely of dignity and degree; that diabolos, or "the calumniator," is a title limited to the devil, i. e., to the fallen archangel-the author of evil and of death, the father of lies, and the accuser of man-whereas daimon is used to denote any subordinate evil spirit, we would point to the passage in St. John, vi. 70, where our Lord, imputing moral guilt to Judas, calls him a devil-" Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil," in which not daimon, but this very word, diabolos, or "calumniator," is used; whereas, as above observed, when the Jews impute madness to our Lord, it is a daimon which they allege him to have. With the reality of this distinction, and that it is intentionally preserved throughout by our Lord himself, and probably by St. John also, we feel strongly impressed; that even those of the disciples, who followed the current belief among the Jews, and believed these

states of madness to result from a foreign spirit predominating over the proper intelligence of the patient, always use daimon, and its synonyms, "wicked spirit" and "unclean spirit," in this restricted sense, that is, in association with human madness or derangement, or disease of a convul sive character; that wherever they designate an evil spirit by these terms, they designate them, not as in their own essence, or abstracted from body, but as manifested in their effects in the sphere of living humanity—in the tremor and the palsy, the gnashing and the foam, the convulsive action, the frantic gestures, the wild words, the terrible expression, the upturned eye, the death-like coma, the altered consciousness, and, occasionally, perhaps, the awakened vision, or exalted faculties, of man beside himself.

Our interpretation of the passage in St. James's Epistle is in accordance with this view, that he refers to the confessions made by daimonized man."

The same with our explanation of the three spirits of daimons in the Revelations that they refer to three forms of epidemic phrenzy or delusion, whether political, social, or spiritual, in its immediate character, which, propagated like a contagious madness on living man, shall hurry him [if they be not already doing so] into the great and final war, which shall constitute the catastrophe of his tragic history on earth.

The several passages of St. Paul, on the other hand, all of which, except one, refer expressly to the religious ideas prevalent among the Gentiles, and connected with their idol worship, and that one, to a future departure or apostasy from the Chris tian faith, which shall be characterised by, among other things, a return to Gentile doctrines upon daimoniac intercession and worship, we are led, from a comparison of texts, and a consideration of the profound harmony of the apostle's ideas, to explain on another principle, which equally excludes his intending by the word daimon s

* This word represents far more justly the participle daiμovigoμsvos, employed in the original Gospels, than the phrase "possessed by devils," used in our translation. There is nothing in the Greek term at all corresponding with, or suggesting the idea of "possession," strictly speaking.

disembodied wicked spirit-namely, in that sense in which the Greeks themselves with whose philosophy and theosophic poetry he was manifestly conversant, and whom, be it remembered, he is addressing, whether still heathens like the Athenians, or recent Gentile converts like the Corinthians and Colossians-understood the term, that of a divine numen, superior to man and lower than the one supreme God, the Hypsistos and Agathos-in a word, a secondary protecting power, or angelic mediator. And this Gentile explanation of St. Paul's language affords a key to that passage in Revelations, where the word daimon is applied in a precisely similar connexion, to the same Gentile daimon-worship and idolatry revived, in another form, in the corrupted Christian Church.

Yet, having thus done justice to very profound distinctions, in the language even of the apostles, and shown from parallelisms of thought and expression current in the East, and from the deductions of a higher synthetic criticism, that passages, the most apparently opposed to the physical import of the word daimon, as distinguished from the moral, and the view of possession which it will suggest, can be interpreted in the most perfect harmony with it, we do not desire to press this point further. For, admitting that our interpretations were wholly wrong, and that the popular sense of devil were the true one in every one of these instances, in the Epistles and Revelations, it would only show, what we have already allowed, that the disciples themselves, or the greater number of them, regarded these phenomena like the rest of their countrymen, as resulting from the actual indwelling of foreign evil spirits. What we mainly contend is, that our Lord himself never applies the word daimon to a morally evil spirit; for which, as we have seen, he ever employs either "Satan," "diabolos," or "the wicked one;" but to cases of epilepsy and madness, or of some similar physical ailment or mental aberrationcases placed in juxtaposition with "diseases," "sicknesses," and "infirmities;" which, like them, were brought to our Lord to be healed; which accordingly he "healed" and "cured;" and the casting out of which, in the commission given his disciples, is asso

ciated with the healing of the sick, the lame, and the blind. And, whatever the belief of the Jews, which, we never questioned, was similar to that of the Hindoos of this day, and whatever the belief and language of the disciples thereon, so remarkable a reserve and distinction in the language of our Lord himself, should not be wholly overlooked.

But, although we are desirous of establishing, what we are convinced is the truth, and will one day be recognized as such, that the demoniac possessions in the Gospels, those among the Hindoos, and the exhibitions of peculiar forms of mania, epilepsy, hysteria, chorea, &c. among ourselves, are absolutely identical phenomena, between which no true line of distinction can be drawn, we by no means wish, nor do we feel ourselves competent, to pronounce on the real character of the phenomena thus identified. On the one hand, the pythonic spirits of the heathen nations, whether Greek or Hindoo, and the Jewish daimoniacs, may be simply epileptics, or the victims of other physical disease, viewed through the media of those mythic, or superstitious notions, which prevailed in Greece and Syria, and which still prevail in Hindostan. On the other, those perversions of the human reason, or consciousness, which modern European medicine, influenced perhaps by the rationalistic tendency of all modern science, pronounces to be mere results of the destruction or derangement of physical parts or functions, may, for aught we know, depend, even immediately, on causes far more spiritual than medulla, and nerve, and blood-may arise, even according to the laws of material causation, as Bayle has well shewn, from the disorder introduced into these finer portions of our organisation, by spiritual beings, armed with profound knowledge, and moving in the minutest vehicles. They may, in a word, be real demoniac possessions in the most literal sense. And, truly, a close observation of the intrinsically evil character often exhibited by parties suffering under such afflictions-of the apparently immodest, as well as the malignant tendencies which they sometimes evince-tendencies quite opposed to the natural and sane dispositions of the sufferers-may well have led thoughtful observers to recognize, in

these manifestations, some influence transcending the sphere of mere physical agencies; in a word, some power of a moral kind, characterised by malignity of nature and depravity of sentiment. "Many facts," says Schlegel, in his "Philosophy of Life"-" many facts in medical experience, and peculiar phenomena of disease-as well as the loathsome generation of insects in the atmosphere, or on the surface of the earth, and many diseased states in both-appear to point rather to some intrinsically evil, and originally wild, demoniacal character in the sphere of nature." The opinion thus modestly suggested by the great modern German philosopher, is precisely that which was held as undoubted, and authoritatively maintained by the great lights of the Church, during her conflict with paganism and the platonic philosophy. The Fathers abound with passages attributing to "the blast of dæmons divers sicknesses and severe accidents, sudden and strange extravagances, blight in the grain, taint in the atmosphere, pestilential vapours, foul madness, and manifold delusions"-especially those connected with "offerings to idols, the practice of magic, and the deceits of a false divination." One of the most curious passages on this latter subject is the following, from Tertullian, Apology, i. 18. It indicates clearly the practice of mesmerism at the time when he wrote that work, A. D. 198 to 202: "Moreover if magicians also produce apparitions, and disgrace the souls of the departed; if they entrance children, to make them utter oracles," &c.

It is not our purpose, however, as we have already stated, to offer here any decision upon the pythonic question, or pronounce upon the real character and causes of these phenomena of the human system, which have existed in all ages and countries, under different names, exhibiting convulsive action of body in conjunction with a certain derangement of the individual consciousness, and an occasional exaltation of the mental powers. Our object is rather to furnish additional materials to those which already exist, towards a right solution of this question. Having, in our former paper, traced up to its origin the notion of a twofold possession among pagan nations, to which we are led by philosophical reasoning

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upon the actual pythonic data which we have in India, and upon the relation which natural phenomena assume towards the human mind at different stages of man's spiritual progess, of which relation these data afford conclusive proof; such reasoning being the only guide we can follow, when the spiritual machinery introduced in this pythonic system, with its duality and antagonism, is manifestly false, and we can neither admit a possession genuinely divine, nor one harmoniously and consistently demoniac in its operations; and having now brought before our readers the two different aspects in which these phenomena-divested of this false duality-divested also of the variety which they assume, from the different modes of belief, religious, superstitious, or scientific, prevailing in different countries and times, and reduced to one single class of facts, whether as presented in the Hindoo system of possession, or in the evangelical narratives, or in the records of medical experience of our own days, may be regarded by Christians; the purely spiritual aspect, which shall represent all such phenomena, as the immediate effect of a personal demoniac indwelling; or the mediate physical aspect, which, looking upon them still, indeed, as the effect of Satanic power, not in the former, personal, but in that, perhaps, far profounder, and more universal sense, in which death and disease, and all the bodily sufferings of man, are the undoubted work of that old Serpent, who was a murderer from the beginning, and who is expressly declared to have the power of death-presents them only as onethough, doubtless, a very peculiar— branch of that great upas-tree of disease and mortality, which spreads its shadow over the earth, giving the lie to every system of philosophic opti inism, rebuking by its stern reality all the glorious dreams of poetry, all the sun-lit, cloud-built visions of romance, and standing upon our planet, the everpresent record and proof of the rebel angel's conquest and dominion over fallen man, till that day when the Redeemer, whom the shepherd prince of Chaldea foresaw in his affliction, shall stand upon the earth, and the last enemy-death-shall be destroyed before him having thus brought before our readers all that we deem essential

they should have present to their minds, to enable them to understand rightly, and judge comprehensively the novel facts upon which we are about to enter, we return from our long and discursive circuit, and shall, in our next, proceed to redeem the promise which we made at the close of our former paper, to illustrate the subject of

Waren, or the divine afflatus of the Hindoos, by laying before them a series of pythonic sketches, drawn up on the spot several years ago, as memoranda of a system, the existence of which we discovered with some surprise, and the various ramifications of which, formed for some time a subject of interesting inquiry.

POSTSCRIPT.

[Since the foregoing was in type, our eye has fallen upon a critical notice of the first part of this paper, which describes it, as having for its scope and object, "to explain the miracles of the Redeemer on natural principles, and to limit his power by the faith of those on whom it was exercised.' A judgment thus pronounced upon an isolated portion of a very extensive and complicated argument, which referred for its completion to an antecedent and a succeeding part, must necessarily be precipitate, and could hardly fail of proving unjust. But it is very evident, that even the brief fragment thus characterised was either read very hastily, or very imperfectly comprehended. Of the power of faith to triumph over matter, and the necessity of its presence to such triumph, not representing that power as independent of the divine will, or that necessity as a limitation of the divine power, but both as laws of the spiritual universe and the divine action,-the miraculous itself, the suspension of the natural laws of the material world, being only the result of other higher laws of the spiritual world, with which we are imperfectly acquainted, but according to which laws, flowing as they do from the attributes of his own perfect and unchangeable nature, the Deity must ever be supposed to act, and not, as man, from passion, caprice, or expediency,-of this power and necessity of faith we have said nothing but what is to be adduced from the words of our Lord himself and his disciples, as quoted by us. And, so far from attempting, or wishing, to explain the Redeemer's miracles on natural principles, we expressly pronounced the power which wrought those miracles, to be a power as mysterious, and as far removed from human comprehension, as the dominion which Satan had obtained in the world through sin. We specially appealed to our Lord's restoring the dead son of the widow, calling back the tainted Lazarus from the tomb, and commanding the winds and waves to be still, in proof of his omnipotence, and his consequent power to command homage and acknowledgment, even from the shattered intellect of the maniac. We maintained these cures of the daimoniacs to be rightly selected as triumphant evidence of the power and mission of Him, who came to destroy the works of the devil. We placed them in the same category as the cure of the paralytic, the cleansing of the lepers, the raising of the dead, the pardon and restoration of the penitent sinner; as exertions of a divine power, manifestly above nature, which rebuked Satan, and drave him out of his usurped dominion over man. In all this there is surely no attempt to deny or explain away the miracles of our Divine Redeemer. The one sole point which, either in the former or the present portion of the paper we have suggested as debatable, was this,-whether the daimons or pneumata expelled, were really and objectively [and not merely subjectively in the minds of the patients and spectators,] Satanic spirits; or whether they ought not rather to be regarded as peculiar forms of physical disease, which, owing to the convulsive action, mental derangement, and temporary loss of proper consciousness which attended them, had assumed, in the popular superstition of the later Jews, this supernatural character; as among the Greeks and Romans they were regarded as the visitations of Apollo and Dindymene. And this view of the question we considered not only as strongly pressed upon our examination by the system of possession and exorcism which we encounter in Hindoo life, and the ideas which we find stereotyped in the Hindoo languages, classic as well as vernacular; but perfectly warranted, and almost forced upon our acceptance by the peculiar phraseology of the New Testament itself, as already pointed out. We have presented this, not as the sole, but as one of the views which may be taken of these daimoniacal affections by believers; as one which has already been openly adopted by several Christian commentators in regard to some, at least, of these cases, and is very widely diffused among medical men; and one which our daily increasing acquaintance with the facts of Eastern life, and the language and ideas of Eastern nations, is likely to force still further upon our attention, however unwilling. And

this view, the consideration of which is thus, at no distant day, inevitable, we have presented, for the first time, we believe, fully developed, and developed from a Christian point of view, fully harmonised with the most entire and undoubting belief in our Lord's divinity, and with every difficulty of language or of fact considered and removed; thus rescuing this view of the question from the arsenal of infidelity, which it has hitherto contributed secretly to strengthen. This harmony we have based upon two principles, ever necessary to maintain; the distinction between that knowledge which is given to purify the heart of man, and to direct him in his moral and religious conduct, and that which is merely calculated to inform his intellect; and the economy of instruction, observed in the Scriptures and in our Lord's own teaching, in other words, its adaptation to the ideas, the culture, and the capacity of those to whom the instruction is addressed. Our Lord himself has taught us, that, even in moral instruction, there is such an economy; that even in the law, which he came not to destroy but to fulfil and perfect; that even in that Scripture, which cannot be broken, there are precepts, intrinsically short of, nay opposed to, moral justice and perfection, as He came to reveal them; precepts avowedly given, because the Jews were incapable of receiving better; Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives; but from the beginning it was not so" (Matt. xix. 8). Thus there was a sufferance of moral imperfection and wrong, of that which the Redeemer pronounces, in the very next verse, to constitute adultery, because the moral and intellectual condition of the Jews was unsuited to a more perfect dispensation. And if this adaptation to the capacity of his people, this condescending regard to their weakness, and unwillingness to break too rudely and suddenly through ideas, which were the result of their social condition, characterise the teaching of Divine Wisdom in the moral education of the human race, how much more so in regard to matters of natural or speculative truth, of medical and psychological inquiry? Our Lord expressly tells his disciples, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now" (John, xvi. 12). Thus also St. Paul, "I have fed you with milk and not meat, for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able" (1 Cor. iii. 2). And to him who does not see throughout the whole Scripture, and will not admit as necessary elements for understanding and interpreting it, these two great principles, the sacred volume will present difficulties far more insuperable than any which their concession, or the theory which we have based upon them, would involve. We humbly conceive, that in endeavouring to illustrate this difficult and obscure subject, from analogies of fact and language, never before made available, and hitherto accessible to few, and to reconcile with Christian belief that view of it, which so many considerations seem to suggest, but which hitherto might seem at variance with faith, we have done a service to the cause of Christian truth. To harmonise faith in those great divine truths, which must ever be held unchanged and unchangeable, with the advances which knowledge is daily making in the realms of nature, of history, and of science, is a task, the performance of which is indispensable in the Church. For, unless faith ever permanent, and science ever advancing, ever widening its intellectual views, and changing its intellectual formulas, be continually brought into concord, absolute infidelity must ere long be the result. Who, let us ask, best serves the cause of religion-the ecclesiastical authority, who issues a decree against the motion of the earth, "decretum summi Pontificis contra motum terræ," as a Jesuit mathematician significantly terms it, or the commentator who humbly confesses the fact which he finds written in one revelation, the heavens which declare the glory of God, and the firmament which sheweth his handiwork; and endeavours, with earnestness and reverence, to reconcile it with the forms of expression employed in another revelation of a different character, and having a different object,-the law of the Lord which is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony which is sure, making wise the simple: the statutes which are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment which is pure, enlightening the eyes? The same holds good in regard to the discoveries in geological science; to unforeseen but well-established results of historic research; and to these daimoniac cases, which, always a difficulty, our recent advances in ethnographical knowledge begin to place in quite a new light. And if any one should object, "But why moot unnecessarily this difficult question," our answer is, that we have not done so unnecessarily. Our readers should remember that translations of the Gospels are now widely diffused, and frequently discussed, through that land where the dual system of demoniac and divine possession obtains, where men or women possessed with daimons, or with divinities, damsels with spirits of divination, and vagabond exorcists or perambulators" [iggxoμiva], like the Sons of Sceva, abound; that the pheno mena thus regarded by the common people, and even by the higher classes, who have not come into much contact with Europeans, are, when encountered by our

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