In other essays[13] I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the canonical scriptures of the New Testament “declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records.”  We are told that the Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world—­a proposition which, in one sense of the word “spiritual,” I should not think it necessary to dispute.  But, when it is taken to signify that everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive people—­it is at any rate permissible to ask why?  Science may be unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless.  We have simply three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely nothing.  But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any other.

Elsewhere I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality:  still less to brand them with the question-begging vituperative appellation of “infidelity.”  The point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether, from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably true.  If they are they will be accepted in time, whether they are wicked or not wicked.  Nature, so far as we have been able to attain to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes for righteousness by very round-about paths.  And, at any rate, whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any matter.  But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their daily professional and business needs, is increasing and will continually increase.  The phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on men’s lips, but in practice they are Naturalists.  The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the precept “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” on Sunday, on Monday dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office; even parish