eiving us is left to the demons except suggestion, which has been
left them by God to try our virtue.

2d. In respect to all those prodigies and spells which the common
people attribute to sorcery and intercourse with the demon, it is
proved that they can only be done by means of natural magic; this is
the opinion of the greater number of the fathers of the church.

3d. All that demons have to do with the criminal practices of those
who are commonly called sorcerers is suggestion, by which he invites
them to the abominable research of all those natural causes which can
hurt our neighbor.

4th. Although those who have desired to maintain the popular error of
the return to earth of souls from purgatory, may have endeavored to
support their opinion by different passages, taken from St. Augustine,
St. Jerome, St. Thomas, &c., it is attested that all these fathers
speak only of the return of the blessed to manifest the glory of God.

5th. Of what may we not believe the imagination capable after so
strong a proof of its power? Can it be doubted that among all the
pretended apparitions of which stories are related, the fancy alone
works for all those which do not proceed from angels and the spirits
of the blessed, and that the rest are the invention of men?

6th. After having sufficiently established the fact, that all
apparitions which cannot be attributed to angels, or the spirits of
the blessed, are produced only by one of these causes: the writer
names them--first, the power of imagination; secondly, the extreme
subtility of the senses; and thirdly, the derangement of the organs,
as in madness and high fevers.

The monk who writes to me maintains that the first proposition is
false; that the ancient fathers of the church ascribe to the demon the
greater number of those extraordinary effects produced by certain
sounds of the voice, by figures, and by phantoms; that the exorcists
in the primitive church expelled devils, even by the avowal of the
heathen; that angels and demons have often appeared to men; that no
one has spoken more strongly of apparitions, of hauntings, and the
power of the demon, than the ancient fathers; that the church has
always employed exorcism on children presented for baptism, and
against those who were haunted and possessed by the demon. Add to
which, the author of the dissertation cites not one of the fathers to
support his general proposition.[646]

The second proposition, again, is false;