ges from them in mentioning two demoniacs instead of one. That
is not contradiction, for if there were two, there was one, but it is
divergence, due to more accurate information. Whether they were meant so
or no, the abbreviations have the striking result that Jesus speaks but
one word, the permissive 'Go,' and that thus His simple presence is the
potent spell before which the demons cower and flee. They know Him as
'the Son of God'; a name which, on their lips, must be taken in its full
significance. If demoniacal possession is a fact, there is no difficulty
in accounting for the name here given to Jesus, nor for the sudden
change from the fierce purpose of barring an intruder's path to abject
submission. If it is not a fact, to make a plausible explanation of
either circumstance will be a task needing many contortions, as is seen
by the attempts to achieve it. For example, we are told that the
demoniacs were afraid of Jesus, because He 'was not afraid of them,' and
they knew Him, because 'men with shattered reason also felt the spell,
while the wise and the strong-minded often used their intellect, under
the force of passion or prejudice, to resist the force of truth.'
Possibly the last clause goes as far to explain some critics'
non-recognition of demoniacal possession as the first does to explain
the demoniacs' recognition of Jesus!

To the demonic nature Christ's coming brought torture, as the sunbeam,
which gives life to many, also gives death to ugly creatures that crawl
and swarm in the dark. Turn up a stone, and the creeping things hurry
out of the penetrating glare so unwelcome. 'What maketh heaven, that
maketh hell,' and the same presence is life or death, joy or agony. The
dear perception of divine purity and the shuddering recoil of impotent
hatred from it are surely of the very essence of the demonic nature, and
every man, who looks into the depths of his own spirit, knows that the
possibilities of such a state are in him.

Our Lord discriminated between healing the sick and casting out demons.
He distinguished between forms of disease due to possession and the same
diseases when dissociated from it, as, for example, cases of dumbness.
His whole attitude, both in His actual dealing with the possessed and in
His referring to the subject, gave His complete adhesion to the reality
of the awful thing. It is vain to say that He humoured the delusions of
insanity in order to cure them. That theory does not adequ