EVIL SPIRITS. 359 



witchcraft. Sir Matthew Hale lays it down in one of his rulings 

 that it is an undoubted fact that there is such a thing as witch- 

 craft, and that witches ought to be punished. Even Shakespeare 

 shared in the general belief ; the witches in Macbeth were to him, 

 not poetic creations, stern realities. 



The question is, then : How did this marvelous delusion arise ? 

 Three causes, I believe, produced it. 1. To quote Lecky, the his- 

 torian : " A religion that rests largely on terrorism will engender 

 the belief in witches or magic ; for the panic which its teachings 

 create overbalances the faculties of the multitude." This is true: 

 a cruel religion, as Christianity became when it began to rest 

 more and more on the basis of eternal punishment and the wrath 

 of God, will inevitably be haunted by the fear of evil spirits. 

 Therefore it is that the religion of Zoroaster and that of Brahma 

 have been free from the reproach of the persecution of witches 

 and sorcerers. 2. The support from the Bible. Now, there is no 

 doubt at all that the Bible does support the doctrine of evil spirits 

 and witchcraft. And this fact alone is sufficient to destroy the 

 orthodox theory of what Dr. Briggs calls " biblical inerrancy," or 

 freedom from error, for not one person out of one hundred now 

 believes in the reality of possession by evil spirits. There is, I 

 say, no doubt that the Bible does teach this doctrine. "Thou 

 shalt not suffer a witch to live," was the repeated command in 

 the Levitical law ; this command was the foundation stone upon 

 which the putting to death of witches rested. We all know the 

 story of the witch of Endor, as told in the twenty-eighth chapter 

 of the First Book of Samuel. Again, the devil afflicted Job in 

 various ways, one way being the sending of a tempest which de- 

 stroyed Job's sons. Great atmospheric disturbances were always 

 ascribed to Satanic agency, although a nice distinction prevailed : 

 when the destruction was great, it was ascribed directly to Satan ; 

 when small, to angels, the word angels being used in a double 

 sense, as messengers of evil and messengers of good. To come to 

 the New Testament. Philip baptizes Simon the sorcerer; and 

 Saul of Tarsus finds in Paphos a certain sorcerer, a false phophet, 

 a Jew named Bar-Jesus. 



Whatever view we may take of the Bible, one thing is certain, 

 it abounds with references to evil spirits, the Bible characters 

 believed implicitly in the existence of such spirits, and there is no 

 intimation given that the reign of such evil spirits should cease 

 to exist until the end of all things. We are expressly told, indeed, 

 that "when Christ had called unto him his disciples, he gave 

 them power against unclean spirits to cast them out"; and 

 again: "And these signs stall follow them that believe: in my 

 name shall they cast out devils." 



The third cause of the growth of this delusion, and the most 



