218 AGNOSTICISM VII 



belief or disbelief in which may affect, and has 

 affected, men's lives and their conduct towards 

 other men, in the most serious way then I am 

 bound to believe that Jesus implicitly affirmed 

 himself to possess a " knowledge of the unseen 

 world," which afforded full confirmation of the 

 belief in demons and possession current among 

 his contemporaries. If the story is true, the 

 mediaeval theory of the invisible world may be, 

 and probably is, quite correct ; and the witch- 

 finders, from Sprenger to Hopkins and Mather, 

 are much-maligned men. 



On the other hand, humanity, noting the 

 frightful consequences of this belief; common 

 sense, observing the futility of the evidence on 

 which it is based, in all cases that have been 

 properly investigated ; science, more and more 

 seeing its way to inclose all the phenomena of 

 so-called " possession " within the domain of 

 pathology, so far as they are not to be relegated 

 to that of the police all these powerful influences 

 concur in warning us, at our peril, against 

 accepting the belief without the most careful 

 scrutiny of the authority on which it rests. 



I can discern no escape from this dilemma : 

 either Jesus said what he is reported to have 

 said, or he did not. In the former case, it is in- 

 evitable that his authority on matters connected 

 with the "unseen world" should be roughly 

 shaken; in the latter, the blow falls upon the 



