Some time ago, in one of the many criticisms with which I am favored, I met with the remark that, at our time of life, Mr. Gladstone and I might be better occupied than in fighting over the Gadarene pigs. And, if these too famous swine were the only parties to the suit, I, for my part, should fully admit the justice of the rebuke. But, under the beneficent rule of the Court of Chancery, in former times, it was not uncommon that a quarrel about a few perches of worthless land ended in the ruin of ancient families and the ingulfing of great estates; I think that our admonisher failed to observe the analogy—to note the momentous consequences of the judgment which may be awarded in the present apparently insignificant action in re the swineherds of Gadara.
The immediate effect of such judgment will be the decision of the question whether the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology of the men of the first century as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it as degrading falsity. The reverend Principal of King's College has delivered his judgment in perfectly clear and candid terms. Two years since, Dr. Wace said that he believed the story as it stands; and consequently he holds, as a part of divine revelation, that the spiritual world comprises devils, who, under certain circumstances, may enter men and be transferred from them to four-footed beasts. For the distinguished Anglican divine and biblical scholar, that is part and parcel of the teachings respecting the spiritual world which we owe to the founder of Christianity. It is an inseparable part of that Christian orthodoxy which, if a man rejects, he is to be considered and called an "infidel." According to the ordinary rules of interpretation of language, Mr. Gladstone must hold the same view.
If antiquity and universality are valid tests of the truth of any belief, no doubt this is one of the beliefs so certified. There are no known savages, nor people sunk in the ignorance of partial civilization, who do not hold them. The great majority of Christians have held them and still hold them. Moreover, the oldest records we possess of the early conceptions of mankind in Egypt and in Mesopotamia prove that exactly such demonology, as is implied in the Gadaran story, formed the substratum, and, among the early Accadians, apparently the greater part, of their supposed knowledge of the spiritual world. M. Lenormant's profoundly interesting work on Babylonian magic and the magical texts given in the appendix to Prof. Sayce's Hibbert Lectures leave no doubt on this head. They prove that the doctrine of possession, and even the particular case of pig possession,[1] were firmly believed in
- ↑ The wicked, before being annihilated, returned to the world to disturb men; they entered into the body of unclean animals," often that of a pig, as on the sarcophagus of Seti I in the Soane Museum."—Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 88, editorial note.
