MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL METHOD. 533 



Some time ago, in one of the many criticisms with which I am 

 favored, I met with the remark that, at onr time of life, Mr. Glad- 

 stone and I might be better occupied than in fighting over the 

 Gadarene pigs. And, if these too famous swine were the only 

 parties to the suit, I, for my part, should fully admit the justice of 

 the rebuke. But, under the beneficent rule of the Court of Chan- 

 cery, in former times, it was not uncommon that a quarrel about 

 a few perches of worthless land ended in the ruin of ancient 

 families and the ingulfing of great estates ; I think that our ad- 

 monisher failed to observe the analogy to note the momentous 

 consequences of the judgment which may be awarded in the pres- 

 ent apparently insignificant action in re the swineherds of Gadara. 



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 per- 

 fectly 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 distin- 

 guished Anglican divine and biblical scholar, that is part and par- 

 cel 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 inter- 

 pretation 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 

 civilization, who do not hold them. The great majority of Chris- 

 tians 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 im- 

 plied in the Gadaran 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 Prof. 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,* were firmly believed in 



* The wicked, before being annihilated, returned to the world to disturb men ; they en- 

 tered into the body of unclean animals," often that of a pig, as on the sarcophagus of Set* 

 I in the Soane Museum." Lenobmant, Chaldean Magic, p. 88, editorial note. 



