"I have observed, sir," Mr. Sales said, feeling obliged to say something, "that people who have the reputation of being the most correct and irreproachable are often the most unmerciful toward wrong-doers. It gives one an unpleasant impression of religion."
"Not justly," the priest replied. "What you say of some good people is quite true—they are moral skeletons since, after all, good principles are only the vertebræ of a character. But there are many charitable Christians in the world. I find fault with their imaginations chiefly; they cannot fancy themselves accused without being guilty."
And thus, in the midst of an increasing excitement, Mr. Schöninger's trial came on.
SPIRITUALISM.
CHAPTER III.
The spiritualists who protest against the attribution of spiritualistic phenomena to the devil may be divided into two classes: 1st, Those who believe there is no such being as the devil; 2d, Those who, believing him to exist, think it unreasonable to attribute such phenomena as those under consideration to such a being.
To these first I can but admit that there is no demonstrating the devil; but, on the other hand, I would remind them that, in denying his existence, they are opposing themselves, 1st, to the religious instinct of the great mass of mankind, who are persuaded that life is a warfare, that there is an enemy. 2d, To the unwavering, explicit tradition of the Christian church. It is impossible to read the Gospels and the other records of the early church without having the idea of a battle, and an enemy against whom it is waged, brought prominently before you. Our Lord came to break the power of Satan, and to take away "the armor in which he trusted"; and the church was instituted for his detailed discomfiture. Every soul that is saved is regarded as a spoil snatched from the hand of the enemy; every one who is cast out of the church is delivered over to Satan.
Some of the earliest words of the church's ritual are words of defiance and adjuration of the enemy upon whom it was her mission to trample. Her exorcisms, for instance, in the baptism service testify to a consciousness of the devil's presence which is simply startling in its realism. He is never forgotten from the moment when, gently breathing on the child's face, she charges the unclean spirit to give place to the Holy Ghost, to the moment when he is cast out headlong, followed by the renunciations of his rescued victim.