pious days, they believed that _Incubi_ and _Succubi_ were
forever wandering among mankind, alluring, by more than human charms,
the unwary to their destruction, and laying plots, which were too often
successful, against the virtue of the saints. Sometimes the witches
kindled in the monastic priest a more terrestrial fire. People told,
with bated breath, how, under the spell of a vindictive woman, four
successive abbots in a German monastery had been wasted away by an
unholy flame."

An instance is given in which the devil not only assumed the appearance
of a holy man, in order to pay his addresses to a lady, but when
discovered, crept under the bed, suffered himself to be dragged out,
and was impudent enough to declare that he was the veritable bishop. So
perfectly had he assumed the form and features of the prelate that those
who knew the bishop best were deceived.

One can hardly imagine the frightful state of the human mind during
these long centuries of darkness and superstition. To them, these things
were awful and frightful realities. Hovering above them in the air, in
their houses, in the bosoms of friends, in their very bodies, in all the
darkness of night, everywhere, around, above and below, were innumerable
hosts of unclean and malignant devils.

From the malice of those leering and vindictive vampires of the air,
the church pretended to defend mankind. Pursued by these phantoms, the
frightened multitudes fell upon their faces and implored the aid of
robed hypocrisy and sceptered theft.

Take from the orthodox church of to-day the threat and fear of hell, and
it becomes an extinct volcano.

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the
incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, and
the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.

Notwithstanding all the infamous things justly laid to the charge of the
church, we are told that the civilization of to-day is the child of what
we are pleased to call the superstition of the past.

Religion has not civilized man--man has civilized religion. God improves
as man advances.

Let me call your attention to what we have received from the followers
of the ghosts. Let me give you an outline of the sciences as taught by
these philosophers of the clouds.

All diseases were produced, either as a punishment by the good ghosts,
or out of pure malignity by the bad ones. There were, properly speaking,
no diseases. The sick were poss