DEMONIACAL POSSESSION.
The question of Demoniacal Possession now demands a passing notice.
The author of "Supernatural Religion" ascribes all such phenomena to
imposture or delusion; and, inasmuch as these supposed miracles of
casting out of evil spirits are associated with other miracles of Christ
in the same narrative, he uses the odium with which this class of
miracles is in this day regarded, for the purpose of discrediting the
miracles of healing and the Resurrection of Jesus.
I cannot help expressing my surprise at the difficulty which some
writers, who desire fully and faithfully to uphold the supernatural,
seem to have respecting Demoniacal Possession. The difficulty seems to
me to be not in the action of evil spirits in this or in that way, but
in their existence. And yet the whole analogy of nature, and the state
of man in this world, would lead us to believe, not only in the
objective existence of a world of spirits, but in the separation of
their characters into good and evil.
Those who deny the fact of an actually existing spiritual world of
angels, if they are Atheists, must believe that man is the highest
rational existence in the universe; but this is absurd, for the
intellect of man in plainly very circumscribed, and he is slowly
discovering laws which account for the phenomena which he sees, which
laws were operative for ages before he discovered them, and imply
infinitely more intellect in their invention, so to speak, and
imposition and nice adjustment with one another, than he shows in their
mere discovery. A student, for instance, has a problem put before him,
say upon the adjustments of the forces of the heavenly bodies. The
solution, if it evinces intelligence in him, must evince more and older
intelligence in the man who sets him the problem; but if the conditions
of the problem truly represent the acts of certain forces and their
compensations, can we possibly deny that there is an intellect
infinitely above ours who calculated beforehand their compensations and
adjustments. All the laws of the universe must be assumed to be, even if
they are not believed to be, the work of a personal intellect absolutely
infinite, whose operations cannot be confined to this world, for it
gives laws to all bodies, no matter how distant. The same reasoning,
then, which shows that there is an intelligent will, because it can
solve a problem, necessitates an infinitely higher Intelligence which
can order the motions of distant worlds by laws of which our highest
calculative processes are perhaps very clumsy representations.
Those who, like the author of "Supernatural Religion," are good enough
to admit (with limitations) the existence of a Supreme Being, and yet
deny the existence of a spiritual world above ours, seem to me to act
still more absurdly. For the whole analogy of the world of nature would
lead as to infer that, as there is a descending scale of animated beings
below man reaching down to the lowest forms of life, so there is an
ascending scale above him, between him and God. The deniers of the
existence of such beings as angels undertake to assert that there are no
beings between ourselves and the Supreme Being, because nature (meaning
by nature certain lower brute forces, such as gravitation and
electricity), "knows nothing" of them.
The Scriptures, on the contrary, would lead us to believe that just as
in the natural world there are gradations of beings between ourselves
and the lowest forms of life, so in the spiritual world (and we belong
to both worlds) there are gradations of beings between ourselves and God
Who created all things.
The Scriptures would lead us to believe that these beings are
intelligent free agents, and, as such, have had their time of
probation--that some fell under their trial, and are now the enemies of
God as wicked men are, and that others stood in the time of trial and
continue the willing servants of God.
The Scriptures reveal that good angels act as good men do; they
endeavour, as far as lies in their power, to confirm others in goodness
and in the service of God; and that evil angels act as evil men act,
they endeavour to seduce others and to involve them in their own
condemnation.
The Scriptures say nothing to satisfy our curiosity about these beings,
as Apocryphal books do. They simply describe the one as sent on errands
of mercy, and the other as delighting in tempting men and inflicting
pain. The mystery of the fall of some of these angels, and their
consequent opposition to God, is no difficulty in itself. It is simply
the oldest form of that which is to those who believe in the reality of
the holiness and goodness of God the great problem of the universe--the
origin and continuance of evil. It is simply the counterpart amongst a
world of free agents above us of what takes place according to the
[so-called] natural order of things amongst ourselves.
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]
Again, if we take into consideration the fact that in not a few cases
madness is produced by moral causes, by yielding to certain temptations,
as, for instance, to drunkenness, there will be still less difficulty in
believing that madness, arising from the action of an evil being, may be
the punishment of yielding to the seductions of that evil being.
The miraculous cure of demoniacal possession presents, I need hardly
say, less physical difficulty than any other cure performed by our Lord.
Assuming the presence of an evil spiritual existence in the possessed
person coming face to face with the most exalted spiritual Power and
Goodness, the natural result is that the one quails before the other.
But, in truth, all the difficulties respecting possession arise not so
much from our ignorance, as from our dogmatism. We assert the dogma, or
at least we quietly assume the dogma, that there are no spiritual or
intellectual beings between ourselves and God; or, if we shrink from an
assertion which so nearly implies our own omniscience, we lay down that
these superior beings, of whose laws we know nothing, can only act upon
us in ways precisely similar to those on which we act upon one another.