To whatsoever order of beings the hero of this tale may have belonged;--whatsoever may have been his proper appellative,--a man with two natures, one human, the other diabolical,--a man with a devil in him, a madman,--or a man in his sound senses counterfeiting a diabolized man or a madman,--the tale itself is surely an eminently curious one. Of these human or superhuman antagonists of his--of these pretended masters over evil spirits--the number is not less than seven: yet, in comparison of him, so feeble and helpless are they all together, that he not only masters them all seven, but gets them down, all seven together, and while they are lying on the ground in a state of disablement, pulls the clothes off their backs: but whether one after another, or all at the same time, is not mentioned. Be this as it may, hereupon comes a question or two. While he was stripping any one of them, what were the others about all that time? The beating they received, was it such as to render them senseless and motionless? No: this can scarcely have been the case; for, when the devil had done his worst, and their sufferings were at the height, out of the house did they flee, wounded as they were. "Jesus I know, and Paul I know," says the mysterious hero, in the fifteenth verse. Hereupon an observation or two calls for utterance. Supposing him a man, who, knowing what he was about, counterfeited the sort of being, who was half man, half devil,--one-half of this speech of his, namely, _Paul I know_, may without much difficulty be believed. But, upon this supposition, forasmuch as he acted with so much effect against these rivals of Paul's,--a supposition not less natural, to say the least of it, is--that to Paul he was not unknown, any more than Paul to him: in a word, that on this occasion, between the evil spirit and the self-constituted Apostle, a sort of understanding had place. Be this as it may, how extraordinary a person must he not have been, to undertake the complete mastery of seven men at once! Seven men, all of them young enough to have a father, not only living, but officiating as a priest: and at the same time, all of them old enough, if not to exercise, mastery over evil spirits, at any rate to undertake it! In Paul's suite, all this time, as far as appears, was the author of this narrative. The scene thus exhibited--was he then, or was he not, himself an eyewitness of it? On a point so material and so natural, no light has he afforded us.