r names, each for himself and
his subordinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be
molested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583,
gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast out twelve
thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical
annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in
boasts of such "mighty works."(354)

(354) In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have
quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a very large
collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I have mainly availed
myself of the copious translations given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his
excellent article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, entitled
Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and spread of
exorcism, see Lecky's European Morals (third English edition), vol. i,
pp. 379-385.

Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning, by
the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in Scripture and
partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and his work among men.

Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against "science
falsely so called," the world had come a long way indeed from the
soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the noblest
of his titles that of "The Great Physician." The result was natural: the
treatment of the insane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer,
the torturer, and the executioner.

To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate
development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in
the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded
the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the Visigothic
Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of some good
enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered minds
might have been restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven
into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were
saved as mere lunatics--they were surrendered to general carelessness,
and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast
numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan.

One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most
common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a
lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so
thoughtful and kindly