alf was John
Wesley, and the strength and beauty of his character made his influence
in this respect all the more unfortunate. The same servitude to the mere
letter of Scripture which led him to declare that "to give up witchcraft
is to give up the Bible," controlled him in regard to insanity. He
insisted, on the authority of the Old Testament, that bodily diseases
are sometimes caused by devils, and, upon the authority of the New
Testament, that the gods of the heathen are demons; he believed that
dreams, while in some cases caused by bodily conditions and passions,
are shown by Scripture to be also caused by occult powers of evil; he
cites a physician to prove that "most lunatics are really demoniacs." In
his great sermon on Evil Angels, he dwells upon this point especially;
resists the idea that "possession" may be epilepsy, even though ordinary
symptoms of epilepsy be present; protests against "giving up to infidels
such proofs of an invisible world as are to be found in diabolic
possession"; and evidently believes that some who have been made
hysterical by his own preaching are "possessed of Satan." On all this,
and much more to the same effect, he insisted with all the power given
to him by his deep religious nature, his wonderful familiarity with the
Scriptures, his natural acumen, and his eloquence.

But here, too, science continued its work. The old belief was steadily
undermined, an atmosphere favourable to the truth was more and more
developed, and the act of Parliament, in 1735, which banished the crime
of witchcraft from the statute book, was the beginning of the end.

In Germany we see the beginnings of a similar triumph for science. In
Prussia, that sturdy old monarch, Frederick William I, nullified the
efforts of the more zealous clergy and orthodox jurists to keep up the
old doctrine in his dominions; throughout Protestant Germany, where
it had raged most severely, it was, as a rule, cast out of the Church
formulas, catechisms, and hymns, and became more and more a subject for
jocose allusion. From force of habit, and for the sake of consistency,
some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the
old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as
absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it
had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they
believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of the
insane.(377)