That evil angels can tempt the souls of men, and in some cases injure their bodies, is not a whit more difficult than that evil men can do the same under the government of a God who exerts so universal a providence as is described in the Bible, and allowed to some extent by the author of “Supernatural Religion.”

I confess that I cannot understand the difficulty which some Christian writers evidently feel respecting the existence of such a thing as Demoniacal possession, whilst they seem to feel, or at least they express no difficulty, respecting Demoniacal temptation.  Demoniacal possession is the infliction of a physical evil for which the man is not accountable, but demoniacal temptation is an attempt to deprive a man of that for the keeping of which he is accountable, viz. his own innocence.  Demoniacal possession is a temporal evil.  The yielding to demoniacal temptation may cast a man for ever out of the favour of God.  And yet demoniacal temptation is perfectly analogous to human temptation.  A human seducer has it in his power, if his suggestions are received, to corrupt innocence, render life miserable, undermine faith in God and in Christ, and destroy the hopes of eternity—­and a diabolical seducer can do no more.

Again, the Scriptures seem to teach us that these wicked spirits are the authors of certain temporal evils, and I do not see that there is anything unreasonable in the fact, if it be granted, that there are spirits who exist independent of bodily frames—­that these spirits are free agents, and have different characters, and act according to their characters, and also that, according to the laws (i.e. within the limitations) of their nature, they have power to act upon those below them in the scale of being, just as we can act upon creatures below us according to the limitations, i.e. the laws, of our nature.  We are in our way able to inflict evil or to ward off evil from our fellow creatures, under the limitations, or laws which a higher Power has set over us; and the Scriptures teach us that there are other beings in the great spiritual kingdom of God who are able to do us good or mischief under the conditions which the same Supreme Power has imposed on their action.  So that the one thing which the Scriptures reveal to us is, that there is a far vaster spiritual kingdom of God than the human race.

With respect to demoniacal possession, our difficulties arise from two things—­from our utter ignorance of the nature and real causes of mental diseases, and from our ignorance of the way in which purely spiritual beings can act upon beings such as ourselves, who ordinarily receive impressions only through our bodily organs.  We know not, for instance, how God Himself acts upon our spirits, and yet, if He cannot, He has less power over us than we have over one another.

Respecting the fact of God permitting such a thing as possession, there is no more real difficulty than is involved in His permitting such a thing as madness.  The symptoms of possession seem generally to have resembled mania, and ascribing certain sorts of mania to evil spirits is only assigning one cause rather than another to a disease of whose nature we are profoundly ignorant. [178:1]