These descriptions of personal intercourse between Christ and the demons cannot be interpreted as metaphorical. “In the temptation of Christ and in the possession of the swine, imagination could have no place. Christ was _above_ its delusions; the brutes were _below_ them.” Farrar (Life of Christ, 1:337-341, and 2:excursus vii), while he admits the existence and agency of good angels, very inconsistently gives a metaphorical interpretation to the Scriptural accounts of evil angels. We find corroborative evidence of the Scripture doctrine in the domination which one wicked man frequently exercises over others; in the opinion of some modern physicians in charge of the insane, that certain phenomena in their patients’ experience are best explained by supposing an actual subjection of the will to a foreign power; and, finally, in the influence of the Holy Spirit upon the human heart. See Trench, Miracles, 125-136; Smith’s Bible Dictionary, 1:586—“Possession is distinguished from mere temptation by the complete or incomplete loss of the sufferer’s reason or power of will; his actions, words, and almost his thoughts, are mastered by the evil spirit, till his personality seems to be destroyed, or at least so overborne as to produce the consciousness of a twofold will within him like that in a dream. In the ordinary assaults and temptations of Satan, the will itself yields consciously, and by yielding gradually assumes, without losing its apparent freedom of action, the characteristics of the Satanic nature. It is solicited, urged, and persuaded against the strivings of grace, but it is not overborne.” T. H. Wright, The Finger of God, argues that Jesus, in his mention of demoniacs, accommodated himself to the beliefs of his time. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 274, with reference to Weiss’s Meyer on _Mat. 4:24_, gives Meyer’s arguments against demoniacal possession as follows: 1. the absence of references to demoniacal possession in the Old Testament, and the fact that so-called demoniacs were cured by exorcists; 2. that no clear case of possession occurs at present; 3. that there is no notice of demoniacal possession in John’s Gospel, though the overcoming of Satan is there made a part of the Messiah’s work and Satan is said to enter into a man’s mind and take control there (_John 13:27_); 4. and that the so-called demoniacs are not, as would be expected, of a diabolic temper and filled with malignant feelings toward Christ. Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 38—“The popular belief in demon-possession gave form to the conceptions of those who had nervous diseases, so that they expressed themselves in language proper only to those who were actually possessed. Jesus is no believer in Christian Science: he calls sickness sickness and health health; but he regards all disease as a proof and effect of the working of the evil one.”