The symptoms which are alleged to have accompanied it present many of the usual phenomena of madness. No possession is believed to take place now, but such phenomena are attributed to causes purely natural. The supposed possessions therefore which are mentioned in the New Testament or in other ancient writings are said to be due only to ignorance of natural causes. Many very eminent defenders of Christianity have been so deeply impressed by these and other reasons that they have admitted that possession is only a form of madness, and that the language respecting it in the New Testament is based on the current ideas of the day. It is desirable that the difficulty should be put in the strongest light. I will therefore state it in the words of the author of “Supernatural Religion.” “It would be an insult to the understanding of those who are considering this question, to pause here to prove that the historical books of the New Testament, speak in the clearest and most unmistakable terms of actual demoniacal possession.” Now what has become of this theory of disease? The Archbishop of Dublin is probably the only one who asserts the reality of demoniacal possession formerly, and in the present day; and in this way we must say that he is consistent. Dean Milman, on the other hand, who spoke with the enlightenment of the 19th century, “has no scruple in averring his opinion on the subject of demoniacal possession to be that of Joseph Mede, Lardner, Dr. Mead, Paley, and all the learned modern writers. It was a kind of insanity, and nothing is more probable than that lunacy would take the turn, and speak the language of the prevailing superstition of the times.” The Dean, as well as “all the learned modern writers” to whom he refers, felt the difficulty, but in seeking to evade it, they sacrifice the Gospels. They overlook the fact, that the writers of these narratives, not only themselves adopt “the prevailing superstition of the times,” but represent Jesus as doing so with equal completeness. There is no possibility, for instance, of evading such statements as those in the miracle of the country of the Gadarenes, where the objectivity of the demons is so fully recognised, that on being cast out of the man, they are represented as requesting to be allowed to go into the herd of swine, and being permitted by Jesus to do so, the entry of the demons into the swine is at once signalised by the herd running violently down the cliff into the lake and being drowned. (p. 131.) The author might have strengthened his case, as far as modern authorities are concerned, by drawing attention to the fact, that even Dr. Farrar, who seems to maintain the objective reality of demoniacal possessions in his recently published “Life of Christ,” admits that in the statement that the demons locally passed from the man into the swine, some inaccuracy has crept into the narrative of the Evangelists.