I failed for a long time yet to get any new light on the essential nature of the agent with which I was operating, and remained still undecided in my own mind whether it was a spiritual person, superhuman and invisible, or a simple elemental force of nature, placed at the command of every man who knows how to use his own powers. The answers I obtained to my questions were vague, contradictory, and unsatisfactory. I had no doubt that I was doing what in the eyes of ignorance and superstition was called dealing with the devil, and practising what had been denounced, and in former times punished, by the civil law as sorcery or witchcraft. So much was clear and undeniable. But had not all the world misunderstood the real nature of what it had condemned as witchcraft, sorcery, maleficia, and magic? Had they not assumed unnecessarily a preternatural agency, and an evil agent, where there was really only a natural, a good, and a benevolent agent? The bearing of this question on the Christian religion was very obvious, and I well understood the significance of what Voltaire said, one day, to a theologian, “_Sathan! c’est le Christianisme tout entier_; PAS DE SATHAN, PAS DE SAUVEUR,” and I felt that there was truth in what Bayle, the ablest and acutest of all modern authors opposed to Christianity, had said: “Prove to unbelievers the existence of evil spirits, and you will by that alone force them to concede all your dogmas.” In any point of view, Christianity was pledged to assert the existence of Satan and his intervention in human affairs, for according to it, Christ was revealed from heaven and came into the world that he might destroy the devil and his works. If there was no devil, the mission of Christ had no motive, no object, and Christianity is a fable.