The extreme antiquity of these exorcisms is sufficiently vindicated by the poetic paraphrase of Prudentius in the IVth century:
Intonat antistes Domini: fuge callide serpens
Mancipium Christi, fur corruptissime vexas
Desine, Christus adest humani corporis ultor
Non licet ut spolium rapias cui Christus inhœsit
Pulsus abi ventose liquor Christus jubet, exi.[192]
Moreover, though the devil is expelled in baptism, the church never lets her children lose sight of him. She is ever warning them in the words of S. Augustine: "Take care, afflicted mortals, take care that the evil one defile not ever this house of the body; that, introduced by the senses, he debauch not the soul's sanctity, nor cloud the intellectual light. This evil thing winds through all the inlets of the senses, moulds itself in forms, blends with colors, weds with sounds, lurks in anger and guileful speech, clothes itself in scents, transfuses itself in savors, and by a flood of troublous movement obscures the mind with evil desires, and fills with vapor the channels of the understanding, through which the soul's ray might shed the light of reason."[193] Voltaire was quite in the right when he set down a priest who would fain compromise with infidelity by throwing up the devil, in this wise: "Belief in the devil is an essential point of Christianity: no Satan, no Saviour."
Those who, admitting the devil to exist, deny that spiritualistic phenomena are diabolical, urge various pleas which I purpose to examine in detail. They insist upon, 1st, the innocent and friendly character of the phenomena. 2d, The difficulty of believing that the devil would be allowed to take so great a liberty with respectable persons without some sort of understanding on their parts. 3d, The fact that spiritualism is a great and most efficient exponent of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God in a materialistic generation.
Now, as regards the first plea, I simply deny the fact of the innocence. I submit that pantheism and the non-existence of eternal punishment are immoral doctrines, the spread of which is calculated to make the world worse; and that these are pre-eminently the doctrines of spiritualism, taught always indirectly, and standing out more and more clearly in proportion as the pious twaddle in which they are incorporated for the sake of weak brethren is laid aside, and the spiritualistic element can give itself free way.
Demoralizing, also, is the distaste which spiritualism creates for all religion, inasmuch as religion lives by faith. An example of this is given in Experiences with D. D. Home, p. 60. The party of spiritualists had been conversing, as they imagined, with the spirit of the child of one of them, lately dead, the body, in its coffin, being in the room in which they were sitting. After the burial, we are told, "On our way home, every one remarked that the burial-service, which is, in general, so impressive, had that day, while in church, sounded strangely flat and unprofitable. Mrs. Cox asked how it was that the clergyman had not used the words, 'dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth.' We assured her that he had; but she declared she had not heard them, although standing as near to him as any of us."
In other respects spiritualism is by no means innocent. It is impossible to set aside the strong testimony, not merely of medical men, who might be supposed prejudiced, but of so many who have either practised spiritualism themselves, or had spiritualist friends, as to the gradual exhaustion of the vital powers which it produces when persevered in to any extent. And, again, it is by far the most efficacious destructive of the barriers of propriety, particularly between the sexes. No one can read much even of the most respectable séances without feeling that the worthy persons who take part in them, whilst securing, may be, the perfect propriety of the particular séance in which they are engaged, are lending the cloak of their respectability to an institution especially marked out for the dissemination of corruption. My contention is that the devil has in spiritualism the prospect of an excellent harvest of evil, of which he has received a very sufficient earnest.
With regard to the gentle behavior, which is supposed to be inconsistent with the character of one who is spoken of as "a roaring lion," I would observe that this gentleness on the part of the spirits is by no means invariable; see the violent scene (Experiences, p. 154) in which Home is tormented and screams; or, again, where the company is struck by the "disagreeable and fearful glowing" of his eyes (Rep., p. 208). However, it must be confessed that the general character of the manifestations is gentleness itself; but of this sort of gentleness there are plenty of examples in accounts of mediæval magic, when spirits have persevered for a considerable time in gentle, not to say pious, behavior, and, indeed, only came out as devils when worried by the church. The following is taken from the Gloria Posthuma S. Ignatii.[194]
A little girl of nine, the daughter of an artilleryman at Malta, was made quite a pet of by spirits, who were always bringing her little presents of jewelry and fruit, at one time giving her fresh figs in January. She was frightened just at first; but they talked so charmingly of their being creatures of the good God as well as she, and seemed to know so much about the inside of churches, that the child could not but think well of them. They did her a wonderful number of kind services of various sorts. For a long time the child's parents, who never saw the spirits, but only the effects they produced, acquiesced, and seemed to think it rather a good joke. There was only one thing that troubled them, and which ultimately made them call in the priest, and this was that the spirits, who showed themselves amiably enough disposed towards the family in general, had an exceptional spite against one little boy. They never saw him come into the room without showing disgust and saying all sorts of unpleasant things about him to their little protégée. There was nothing peculiar about the boy, except that he served Mass every morning. When the priest was sent for, and the house exorcised, the amiable spirits, as is invariably the case under these circumstances, lost their temper, and went off in ugly shapes, vomiting fire; in fact, to borrow the spiritualist expression, showing themselves very unformed spirits indeed.
With this account we may compare Mr. Fusedale's extraordinary letter (Rep., p. 255), in which he says that the spirits habitually play with his children and amuse them by showing them pretty scenes in a polished globe. He tells us that he has himself seen one of these scenes—a ship hemmed in by ice in an Arctic sea—and that he has often witnessed his little boy shoved across the room in a chair, his legs being too short to reach the ground, and "no human agency near." The two accounts are not unlike, except that in the second story the materials for playing out the last scene are wanting.