* * * * *

About this time, the great phenomenon of these gospels,—­the casting out of devils,—­pressed forcibly on my attention.  I now dared to look full into the facts, and saw that the disorders described were perfectly similar to epilepsy, mania, catalepsy, and other known maladies.  Nay, the deaf, the dumb, the hunchbacked, are spoken of as devil-ridden.  I farther knew that such diseases are still ascribed to evil genii in Mussulman countries:  even a vicious horse is believed by the Arabs to be majnun, possessed by a Jin or Genie.  Devils also are cast out in Abyssinia to this day.  Having fallen in with Farmer’s treatise on the Demoniacs, I carefully studied it; and found it to prove unanswerably, that a belief in demoniacal possession is a superstition not more respectable than that of witchcraft.  But Farmer did not at all convince me, that the three Evangelists do not share the vulgar error.  Indeed, the instant we believe that the imagined possessions were only various forms of disease, we are forced to draw conclusions of the utmost moment, most damaging to the credit of the narrators.[3]

Clearly, they are then convicted of misstating facts, under the influence of superstitious credulity.  They represent demoniacs as having a supernatural acquaintance with Jesus, which, it now becomes manifest, they cannot have had.  The devils cast out of two demoniacs (or one) are said to have entered into a herd of swine.  This must have been a credulous fiction.  Indeed, the casting out of devils is so very prominent a part of the miraculous agency ascribed to Jesus, as at first sight to impair our faith in his miracles altogether.

I however took refuge in the consideration, that when Jesus wrought one great miracle, popular credulity would inevitably magnify it into ten; hence the discovery of foolish exaggerations is no disproof of a real miraculous agency:  nay, perhaps the contrary.  Are they not a sort of false halo round a disc of glory,—­a halo so congenial to human nature, that the absence of it might be even wielded as an objection?  Moreover, John tells of no demoniacs:  does not this show his freedom from popular excitement?  Observe the great miracles narrated by John,—­the blind man,—­and Lazarus—­how different in kind from those on demoniacs! how incapable of having been mistaken! how convincing!  His statements cannot be explained away:  their whole tone, moreover, is peculiar.  On the contrary, the three first gospels contain much that (after we see the writers to be credulous) must be judged legendary.

The two first chapters of Matthew abound in dreams.  Dreams?  Was indeed the “immaculate conception” merely told to Joseph in a dream? a dream which not he only was to believe, but we also, when reported to us by a person wholly unknown, who wrote 70 or 80 years after the fact, and gives us no clue to his sources of information!  Shall I reply that he received his information by miracle?  But why more than Luke? and Luke evidently was conscious only of human information.  Besides, inspiration has not saved Matthew from error about demons; and why then about Joseph’s dream and its highly important contents?