This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the “heathen.” The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadūgar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture him; to expel him; to cause sudden death or an incurable disease; to either strike cattle with or protect them from epidemics; to compose philtres that will either strike with sterility or provoke unbounded passions in men and women, etc., etc. The sight alone of a man said to be such a sorcerer excites in a Hindu profound terror. And now we will quote in this connection the truthful remark of a writer who passed years in India in the study of the origin of such superstitions: “Vulgar magic in India, like a degenerated infiltration, goes hand-in-hand with the most ennobling beliefs of the sectarians of the _Pitris_. It was the _work of the lowest clergy_, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds _the religion of the rabble_.”[95] In India it was the work of the _lowest clergy_; in Rome, that of the _highest Pontiffs_. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that “whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?”[96] Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865: “We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations.... The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal. “I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.