Satan
in a hand-to-hand struggle.

This idea of diabolic influence pervaded his conversation, his
preaching, his writings, and spread thence to the Lutheran Church in
general. Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having more power
with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it out with yet
greater harshness. Beza was especially severe against those who believed
insanity to be a natural malady, and declared, "Such persons are refuted
both by sacred and profane history."

Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the older
Church and in the new, this superstition was developed more and more
into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in the sculptures
and windows and mural decorations of the great medieval cathedrals, had
done much to develop it among the people, so Luther's translation of
the Bible, especially in the numerous editions of it illustrated with
engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it. In
every peasant's cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil
bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of
the Temple--of the woman with seven devils--of the devils cast into
the swine. Every peasant's child could be made to understand the quaint
pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which illustrated vividly
all those texts. In the ideas thus deeply implanted, the men who in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled against this mass of
folly and cruelty found the worst barrier to right reason.(362)

(362) For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar passages in his
works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, pp. 251, 252. As to
the grotesques in mediaeval churches, the writer of this article, in
visiting the town church of Wittenberg, noticed, just opposite the
pulpit where Luther so often preached, a very spirited figure of an
imp peering out upon the congregation. One can but suspect that this
mediaeval survival frequently suggested Luther's favourite topic during
his sermons. For Beza, see his Notes on the New Testament, Matthew iv,
24.

Such was the treatment of demoniacs developed by theology, and such the
practice enforced by ecclesiasticism for more than a thousand years.

How an atmosphere was spread in which this belief began to dissolve
away, how its main foundations were undermined by science, and how there
came in gradually a reign of humanity, will now be related.

II. BE