With respect to the general fact, there can be no doubt that advancing knowledge has caused a general disbelief in the reality of any modern form of possession, or of witchcraft. The supreme grotesqueness of the phenomena of the latter has caused the belief in it to perish under the influence of common sense, aided by an increased acquaintance with sound principles of causation, and the stability of the operations of nature. Still it is incorrect to affirm that the prevalence of such beliefs has been due to no other cause than universal ignorance. The belief in witchcraft produced its most unhappy results during the reigns of Elizabeth and the Stuarts, in the very age of Bacon, Shakespeare, and Raleigh. Such beliefs originate in certain principles of our minds whose gratification consists in the contemplation of the marvellous, the action of which I shall consider hereafter. They have existed in every condition of society, and only changed the form of their manifestation. Those who boast of our freedom from such delusions, owing to the superior light of the nineteenth century, seem to have forgotten the existence at the present day of a belief in spiritualism, which is little, if at all, less absurd than witchcraft, though the former has encountered a less severe treatment than the latter. This has been more due to the improvement of our humanity than to our knowledge of physical science. It is a fact that spiritualism is believed in by multitudes; and its votaries belong far more to the cultivated class of society than to the ignorant and the vulgar. What the witch mania was to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spiritualism is to the nineteenth. It is the peculiar form rather than the possibility of such delusions that has passed away. It should be observed also that the demoniacal supernaturalism of the monastic writers, and of the middle ages, differs from that of the New Testament to such a degree that they cannot fairly be compared. In the former the apparition of demons and departed spirits was a thing of constant occurrence; in the latter, never. To the monks the devil was continually appearing in the most phantastic forms, and performing the most grotesque miracles. To this form of demonology modern spiritualism can put in very strong claims to be esteemed the genuine successor. The heated imagination of even such a man as Luther suggested to him that he saw Satan in visible reality. It is worthy of remark that St. Paul knew nothing of visible Satanic manifestations. With him they were invariably spiritual.