intervention is possible, or assert that it is improbable. They must concede its possibility, its probability, and its susceptibility of proof; and therefore when the evidence in any particular instance is sufficient to establish the reality of any other class of facts, they are bound, as reasonable beings, to admit it. To them there is, and can be no _à priori_ difficulty, for they already believe in the reality of demonic agents adequate to produce the mysterious phenomena that they are called upon to accept. Hence, in those ages and countries in which nobody doubted Christianity, all men of science, physicians, magistrates, as well as the clergy and the people, readily admitted the demonic character of the phenomena like those produced in our day by mesmerism. But, if the belief in the reality of demonic intervention is integral in Christianity, the most obvious way of getting rid of Christianity and its restraints would be to deny that reality, and to explain the phenomena commonly held as evidence of such intervention, on physiological and other natural principles. This has been the aim of science, especially medical science, during the last two hundred years. This aim was adopted by the so-called wits and philosophers of the last century, and during this it has begun to be adopted by jurisprudence, and even to be acquiesced in by a large portion of professed Christian ministers. Literary men, like Sir Walter Scott; founders of new sects, like the late Hosea Ballou, of Boston; neologist theologians everywhere; and that “fourth estate,”—journalism, have all combined to reason, explain, or laugh away, every thing pertaining to demonology, and to make the world believe that there is no devil, that evil spirits are only the creatures of a disordered brain, that apparitions or ghosts are only hallucinations, possession a peculiar kind of madness or insanity, and magic mere charlatanry or sleight-of-hand. All this, for an anti-Christian purpose, was admirable, since even the conservative portion of the clergy seemed to acquiesce in it.