NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 583 



Peter, showing that the devils had been confined by the Al- 

 mighty, and therefore could not be doing on earth the work 

 which was imputed to them. But Bekker's Protestant brethren 

 drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped with his life. 



The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently 

 the worst. So it proved in this case. In the first half of the seven- 

 teenth century the cruelties arising from the old doctrine were 

 more numerous and severe than ever before. In Spain, Sweden, 

 Italy, and, above all, in Germany, we see constant eficorts to sup- 

 press the evolution of the new truth. 



But, in the midst of all this reactionary rage, glimpses of 

 right reason began to appear. It is significant that at this very 

 time, when the old superstition was apparently everywhere tri- 

 umphant, the declaration by Poulet that he and his brother and 

 his cousin had, by smearing themselves with ointment, changed 

 themselves into wolves and devoured children, brought no severe 

 punishment ujDon them. The judges sent him to a mad-house. 

 More and more, in spite of frantic efforts from the pulpit to save 

 the superstition, great writers and jurists, especially in France, 

 began to have glimpses of the truth and courage to uphold it. 

 Malebranche spoke against the superstition ; Siguier led the 

 French courts to annul several decrees condemning sorcerers; 

 the great chancellor, D'Aguesseau, declared to the Parliament of 

 Paris that, if they wished to stop sorcery, they must stop talking 

 about it — that sorcerers are more to be pitied than blamed.* 



But just at this time, as the eighteenth century was approach- 

 ing, the theological current was strengthened by a great ecclesias- 

 tic — the greatest theologian that France has produced, whose 

 influence upon religion and upon the mind of Louis XIV was 

 enormous — Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. There had been reason to 

 expect that Bossuet would at least do something to mitigate the 

 superstition ; for his writings show that in much, which before 

 his time had been ascribed to diabolic possession, he saw simple 

 lunacy. Unfortunately, the same adherence to the literal inter- 

 pretation of Scripture which led him to oppose every other scien- 

 tific truth developed in his time led him also to attack this : he 

 delivered and published two great sermons which, while showing 

 some progress in the form of his belief, showed none the less that 

 the fundamental idea of diabolic possession was still to be tena- 

 ciously held. "What this idea was may be seen in one typical 

 statement : he declared that " a single devil could turn the earth 

 round as easily as we turn a marble." f 



* See Esquirol, "Des Maladies mentales," i, 488, 489 ; ii, 529. 



f See the two sermons, " Sur les Demons " (which are virtually but two forms of the 

 same sermon), in Bossuet's works, edition of 1845, iii, 236 d scq. ; also Dzwiecki, in the 

 " Nineteenth Century," as above. On Bossuet's resistance to other scientific truths, espe- 



