“I know,” Mr. Merton replied, “all that you would say on that score. I have myself read history, and, no less than you, been shocked by its abuses. But there is no truth that cannot be or that has not been abused. I am as much opposed to these abuses as you are. It will not do to suppose that every event a little out of the range of our ordinary experience, is a miracle, or effected, if good, by Angelic, if bad, by Satanic agency. Every time a murrain prevails among the cattle, it will not do to ascribe it to sorcery, or when the butter will not come, to lay the blame upon Robin Goodfellow. The tendency to do so is undoubtedly a superstitious tendency. But the contrary, or Sadducean tendency, to believe in neither angel nor spirit, is even more dangerous. I do not believe every tale of witchcraft I hear, and I am slow to believe in actual Satanic invasion in any particular case that may be alleged. The Church has always asserted the possibility of such invasion, but she does not permit a resort to exorcism on every apparent instance of it. She demands previous consultation, long examination, and the judgment of the most rigid science. While the greatest caution should be exercised as to every case of supposed actual Satanic invasion, we should guard equally against running into the contrary error of denying that such invasion ever takes place. An unreasonable scepticism is as far removed from true wisdom and virtue, as an unreasonable belief. Modern science is sceptical; and it is more important just now to guard against scepticism and its irreligion, than it is to guard against superstition. “Yet we deceive ourselves, if we suppose that the scepticism of science has penetrated far into the popular mind, even in our own country. Science can never root out popular superstitions. While the few laugh at the superstition of the vulgar, that superstition, though modified perhaps as to its forms, continues to thrive, and attains, not unfrequently, even a more vigorous growth. The old popular superstitions, brought hither by our ancestors, still live in the heart of the people, and in forms as gross and as revolting as in the seventeenth century. Superstition is cured, not by a sceptical science, denying altogether the spirit-world, but by religion, which, while it recognizes that world, teaches us to draw accurately the line of demarcation between genuine and counterfeit spirit-manifestations. The people cannot live in absolute irreligion; and where they have not religion, they will have superstition. The tendency of modern science is to destroy all religious faith, and therefore to promote, indirectly, the very evil it proposes to cure,—the common effect of all unbaptized science, as of all unbaptized philanthropy.”