The immediate effect of such judgment will be the decision of the question, whether the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology of the men of the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it, as degrading falsity.  The reverend Principal of King’s College has delivered his judgment in perfectly clear and candid terms.  Two years since, Dr. Wace said that he believed the story as it stands; and consequently he holds, as a part of divine revelation, that the spiritual world comprises devils, who, under certain circumstances, may enter men and be transferred from them to four-footed beasts.  For the distinguished Anglican Divine and Biblical scholar, that is part and parcel of the teachings respecting the spiritual world which we owe to the founder of Christianity.  It is an inseparable part of that Christian orthodoxy which, if a man rejects, he is to be considered and called an “infidel.”  According to the ordinary rules of interpretation of language, Mr. Gladstone must hold the same view.

If antiquity and universality are valid tests of the truth of any belief, no doubt this is one of the beliefs so certified.  There are no known savages, nor people sunk in the ignorance of partial civilisation, who do not hold them.  The great majority of Christians have held them and still hold them.  Moreover the oldest records we possess of the early conceptions of mankind in Egypt and in Mesopotamia prove that exactly such demonology, as is implied in the Gadarene story, formed the substratum, and, among the early Accadians, apparently the greater part, of their supposed knowledge of the spiritual world.  M. Lenormant’s profoundly interesting work on Babylonian magic and the magical texts given in the Appendix to Professor Sayce’s “Hibbert Lectures” leave no doubt on this head.  They prove that the doctrine of possession, and even the particular case of pig, possession,[117] were firmly believed in by the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians before the tribes of Israel invaded Palestine.  And it is evident that these beliefs, from some time after the exile and probably much earlier, completely interpenetrated the Jewish mind, and thus became inseparably interwoven with the fabric of the synoptic Gospels.

Therefore, behind the question of the acceptance of the doctrines of the oldest heathen demonology as part of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, there lies the question of the credibility of the Gospels, and of their claim to act as our instructors, outside that ethical province in which they appeal to the consciousness of all thoughtful men.  And still, behind this problem, there lies another—­how far do these ancient records give a sure foundation to the prodigious fabric of Christian dogma, which has been built upon them by the continuous labours of speculative theologians, during eighteen centuries?