On the other hand, when you get some absolutely extraordinary manifestations such as the seal that appeared to Sir Garnet Wolseley,[38] or the materialization of vampire bats, partially developed monkeys or a full-sized goat,--and I have known all these to occur,--then the love theory falls down badly, and we must seek a more reasonable explanation. If we accept the idea of discarnate spirit intelligences we certainly should not accept them all at face value as good. The bulk of humanity that has passed over has not been good, or for the matter of that, Christian. Assuming that these spirits were human, but took bestial form for purposes of their own, we may find some glimmerings of support for a new theory when we realize that in the past and in the present idolatry prevails. The idols of savages are usually totemistic. And they held that the identity of soul persisted after death, not in a new human existence but as a rebirth in animal form. To a large extent, totemistic paganism was mixed up with licentious and bestial festivals, useful in assuring the continuance and multiplication of a savage tribe, but evolving practices repugnant to Western ethics. The beasts that come back--are beastly. The ghost dog that scratches and paws and leaps into its mistress’s lap is a very different thing to that which it pretends to be. When we reach the foulness of the goat or bat manifestations we feel with no shadow of doubt that we are in touch with the unmasked spirits of evil. Not only visible form, but touch and smell are present. We are brought into distinct contact with the sardonic mocking terror that lies on the other side of life. The border between the brutal and blood-lusting savage and the demon, is a slender one. The conception of a singularly evil earth-bound negro spirit who has believed in an after-life in which his soul will inhabit the body of an ape or a leopard, comes very close to the accepted idea of a devil or demon. We get something of the same basic conception in the idea of the wer-wolf or vampire, and there is a singular reinforcement of this theory in that in the Dark Ages when paganism was yielding reluctantly to the inroads of the Christian faith, the early fathers explicitly identified such animal manifestations with the sorcery of paganism. The fantastic gargoyles that ornament cathedrals are simply traditionalizations of that period when these beast incarnations in all their devilishness contended against the spread of a purer faith. Sometimes it chances that we, in this twentieth century, by accident open a door through which a tenth-century devil can creep in.