But who need be surprised at this? Received science rejects every thing of the sort, for it recognizes no invisible world, believes in neither angel nor spirit, and explains every thing on natural principles. Even theologians have to a great extent forgotten the terrible influence, in times past, of demonic agencies, and, if they do not absolutely reject the instances recorded in the Bible, they are disposed to treat all other cases as humbuggery, knavery, deception, or to class them with epilepsy, insanity, hallucination, and other diseases to which we are subject, and to dismiss them, when they cannot be denied, with the physicians, under the heads of mania, monomania, nymphomania, demonopathy, &c. I have before me the _Dictionaire Infernal_ of M. Collin de Plancy, approved by the late Archbishop of Paris,—him who fell so gloriously on the barricades, June, 1848, whither he had gone as a minister of charity and peace,—in which, from beginning to end, there is a studied effort to represent all these dark and mysterious phenomena as explicable without any resort to superhuman or diabolical agency. The excellent author seems to write on the supposition that all the world, the physicians, the clergy, the magistrates, the civil and ecclesiastical courts during all past times were merely old grannies, and had no sound doctrine, and no capacity for investigating the truth of facts obvious to their senses. With his mode of reasoning, and with far less violence, I can explain away all the miraculous or mysterious relations in Biblical history. But so strong is the current against Satanic agency in the production of these phenomena, and such the prevailing and shortsighted incredulity of our times, that even those who suspect the true explanation are, for the most part, deterred from the ridicule which would be showered upon them from avowing it.