Which doctrine, if it be not true, why, may some say, did not our Saviour contradict it, and teach the contrary? Nay, why does he use on divers occasions such forms of speech as seem to confirm it? To this I answer, that first, where Christ saith, (Luke xxiv. 39) A spirit hath not flesh and bone, though he show that there be spirits, yet he denies not that they are bodies. And where St. Paul says, (1 Cor. xv. 44) we shall rise spiritual bodies, he acknowledgeth the nature of spirits, but that they are bodily spirits; which is not difficult to understand. For air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone, or any other gross body to be discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the devil, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the devil, he meant a disease, as phrensy, or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit, is not the speech improper? Can diseases hear? Or can there be a corporeal spirit in a body of flesh and bone, full already of vital and animal spirits? Are there not, therefore spirits, that neither have bodies, nor are mere imaginations? To the first I answer, that the addressing of our Saviour’s command to the madness, or lunacy he cureth, is no more improper than was his rebuking of the fever, or of the wind and sea; for neither do these hear; or than was the command of God, to the light, to the firmament, to the sun, and stars, when he commanded them to be; for they could not hear before they had a being. But those speeches are not improper, because they signify the power of God’s word; no more therefore is it improper, to command madness, or lunacy, under the appellation of devils by which they were then commonly understood, to depart out of a man’s body. To the second, concerning their being incorporeal, I have not yet observed any place of Scripture, from whence it can be gathered, that any man was ever possessed with any other corporeal spirit, but that of his own, by which his body is naturally moved.
The Scriptures do not teach that spirits are incorporeal.
Our Saviour, immediately after the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove, is said by St. Matthew (chapter iv. 1), to have been led up by the Spirit into the wilderness; and the same is recited (Luke iv. 1) in these words, Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness; whereby it is evident that by spirit there, is meant the Holy Ghost. This cannot be interpreted for a possession; for Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are but one and the same substance; which is no possession of one substance, or body, by another. And whereas in the verses following he is said to have been taken up by the devil into the holy city, and set upon a pinnacle of the temple, shall we conclude thence that he was possessed of the devil, or carried thither by violence? And again, carried thence by the devil into an exceeding high mountain, who showed him thence all the kingdoms of the world: wherein we are not to believe he was either possessed, or forced by the devil; nor that any mountain is high enough, according to the literal sense, to show him one whole hemisphere. What then can be the meaning of this place, other than that he went of himself into the wilderness; and that this carrying of him up and down from the wilderness to the city, and from thence into a mountain, was a vision? Conformable whereunto, is also the phrase of St. Luke, that he was led into the wilderness, not by, but in, the Spirit; whereas, concerning his being taken up into the mountain, and unto the pinnacle of the temple, he speaketh as St. Matthew doth: which suiteth with the nature of a vision.
Again, where St. Luke (chap. xxii. 3, 4) says of Judas Iscariot, that Satan entered into him, and thereupon that he went and communed with the chief priests, and captains, how he might betray Christ unto them; it may be answered, that by the entering of Satan, that is the enemy, into him, is meant, the hostile and traitorous intention of selling his Lord and Master. For as by the Holy Ghost, is frequently in Scripture understood, the graces and good inclinations given by the Holy Ghost; so by the entering of Satan may be understood the wicked cogitations, and designs of the adversaries of Christ, and his disciples. For as it is hard to say, that the devil was entered into Judas, before he had any such hostile design; so it is impertinent to say, he was first Christ’s enemy in his heart, and that the devil entered into him afterwards. Therefore the entering of Satan, and his wicked purpose, was one and the same thing.
The Scriptures do not teach that spirits are incorporeal.
But if there be no immaterial spirit, or any possession of men’s bodies by any spirit corporeal, it may again be asked, why our Saviour and his apostles did not teach the people so; and in such clear words, as they might no more doubt thereof. But such questions as these, are more curious, than necessary for a Christian man’s salvation. Men may as well ask why Christ, that could have given to all men faith, piety, and all manner of moral virtues, gave it to some only, and not to all: and why he left the search of natural causes, and sciences, to the natural reason and industry of men, and did not reveal it to all, or any man supernaturally; and many other such questions. Of which nevertheless there may be alleged probable and pious reasons. For as God, when he brought the Israelites into the land of Promise, did not secure them therein, by subduing all the nations round about them; but left many of them, as thorns in their sides, to awaken from time to time their piety and industry: so our Saviour, in conducting us toward his heavenly kingdom, did not destroy all the difficulties of natural questions; but left them to exercise our industry, and reason; the scope of his preaching, being only to show us this plain and direct way to salvation, namely, the belief of this article, that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and at his coming again, gloriously to reign over his elect, and to save them from their enemies eternally. To which, the opinion of possession by spirits, or phantasms, is no impediment in the way; though it be to some an occasion of going out of the way, and to follow their own inventions. If we require of the Scripture an account of all questions, which may be raised to trouble us in the performance of God’s commands, we may as well complain of Moses for not having set down the time of the creation of such spirits, as well as of the creation of the earth and sea, and of men and beasts. To conclude; I find in Scripture that there be angels, and spirits, good and evil; but not that they are incorporeal, as are the apparitions men see in the dark, or in a dream, or vision; which the Latins call spectra, and took for demons. And I find that there are spirits corporeal, though subtle and invisible; but not that any man’s body was possessed or inhabited by them; and that the bodies of the saints shall be such, namely, spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.
The power of casting out devils, not the same it was in the primitive church.
Nevertheless, the contrary doctrine, namely, that there be incorporeal spirits, hath hitherto so prevailed in the Church, that the use of exorcism, that is to say, of ejection of devils by conjuration, is thereupon built; and, though rarely and faintly practised, is not yet totally given over. That there were many demoniacs in the primitive Church, and few madmen, and other such singular diseases; whereas in these times we hear of, and see many madmen, and few demoniacs, proceeds not from the change of nature, but of names. But how it comes to pass that whereas heretofore the apostles, and after them for a time, the pastors of the Church, did cure those singular diseases, which now they are not seen to do; as likewise, why it is not in the power of every true believer now, to do all that the faithful did then, that is to say, as we read (Mark xvi. 17, 18), in Christ’s name to cast out devils, to speak with new tongues, to take up serpents, to drink deadly poison without harm-taking, and to cure the sick by the laying on of their hands, and all this without other words, but in the name of Jesus, is another question. And it is probable that those extraordinary gifts were given to the Church, for no longer a time, than men trusted wholly to Christ, and looked for their felicity only in his kingdom to come; and consequently, that when they sought authority, and riches, and trusted to their own subtlety for a kingdom of this world, these supernatural gifts of God were again taken from them.
Another relic of Gentilism, worshipping of images, left in the Church, not brought into it.
Another relic of Gentilism is, the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those apparences that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, (1 Cor. viii. 4) we know that an idol is nothing; not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood, was nothing; but that the thing which they honoured, or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour, is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and his lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high-priest; if the people had been permitted to worship, and pray to images, which are representations of their own fancies, they had had no further dependance on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on his prime-ministers, Moses and the high-priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was, they should not take for gods, Alienos Deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions, for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was, that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king, to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation, or by ourselves.