, to leave each one
wealthy heir, they entered on the crooked ways of the new
spiritualism. Buried in a mysterious gloom, losing at the faldstool
all heed and knowledge of themselves, the proudest of them followed
the lesson taught by Molinos: "In this world we live to suffer. But in
time that suffering is soothed and lulled to sleep by a habit of pious
indifference. We thus attain to a negation. Death do you say? Not
altogether. Without mingling in the world, or heeding its voices, we
get thereof an echo dim and soft. It is like a windfall of Divine
Grace, so mild and searching; never more so than in moments of
self-abasement, when the will is wholly obscured."

Exquisite depths of feeling! Alas, poor Satan! how art thou left
behind! Bend low, acknowledge, and admire thy children!

* * * * *

The physicians who, having sprung from the popular empiricism which
men called witchcraft, were far more truly his lawful children, were
too forgetful of him who had left them his highest patrimony, as being
his favoured heirs. They were ungrateful to the Witch, who laid the
way for themselves. Nay, they went further than that. On this fallen
king, their father and creator, they dealt some hard strokes with the
whip. "_Thou, too, my son?_" They gave the jesters cruel weapons
against him.

Even in the sixteenth century there were some to scoff at the spirit
who through all time, from the days of the Sibyl to those of the
Witch, had filled and troubled the woman. They maintained that he was
neither God nor Devil, but only "the Prince of the Air," as the Middle
Ages called him. Satan was nothing but a disease!

_Possession_ to them was only a result of the prison-like, sedentary,
dry, unyielding life of the cloister. As for the 6500 devils in
Gauffridi's little Madeline, and the hosts that fought in the bodies
of maddened nuns at Loudun and Louviers, these doctors called them
physical storms. "If AEolus can shake the earth," said Yvelin, "why not
also the body of a girl?" La Cadiere's surgeon, of whom more anon, had
the coolness to say, "it was nothing more than a choking of the womb."

Wonderful descent! Routed by the simplest remedies, by exorcisms after
Moliere, the terror of the Middle Ages would flee away and vanish
utterly!

This is too sweeping a reduction of the question. Satan was more than
that. The doctors saw neither the height nor the depth of him; neither
his grand revolt in the f