w us
according to the limitations, _i.e._ the laws, of our nature. We are in
our way able to inflict evil or to ward off evil from our fellow
creatures, under the limitations, or laws which a higher Power has set
over us; and the Scriptures teach us that there are other beings in the
great spiritual kingdom of God who are able to do us good or mischief
under the conditions which the same Supreme Power has imposed on their
action. So that the one thing which the Scriptures reveal to us is, that
there is a far vaster spiritual kingdom of God than the human race.

With respect to demoniacal possession, our difficulties arise from two
things--from our utter ignorance of the nature and real causes of mental
diseases, and from our ignorance of the way in which purely spiritual
beings can act upon beings such as ourselves, who ordinarily receive
impressions only through our bodily organs. We know not, for instance,
how God Himself acts upon our spirits, and yet, if He cannot, He has
less power over us than we have over one another.

Respecting the fact of God permitting such a thing as possession, there
is no more real difficulty than is involved in His permitting such a
thing as madness. The symptoms of possession seem generally to have
resembled mania, and ascribing certain sorts of mania to evil spirits is
only assigning one cause rather than another to a disease of whose
nature we are profoundly ignorant. [178:1]

Again, if we take into consideration the fact that in not a few cases
madness is produced by moral causes, by yielding to certain temptations,
as, for instance, to drunkenness, there will be still less difficulty in
believing that madness, arising from the action of an evil being, may be
the punishment of yielding to the seductions of that evil being.

The miraculous cure of demoniacal possession presents, I need hardly
say, less physical difficulty than any other cure performed by our Lord.
Assuming the presence of an evil spiritual existence in the possessed
person coming face to face with the most exalted spiritual Power and
Goodness, the natural result is that the one quails before the other.

But, in truth, all the difficulties respecting possession arise not so
much from our ignorance, as from our dogmatism. We assert the dogma, or
at least we quietly assume the dogma, that there are no spiritual or
intellectual beings between ourselves and God; or, if we shrink from an
assertion which so nearly implies