DEMONIAC POSSESSION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—It occurs to me that there is one deduction from the strange history of the demoniac kor demoniacs) of Gadara (or Gergesa), which, so far as 1 know, has never yet been made, and which is strictly relevant to Professor Huxley's contention on the subject. If brute-beasts (like the swine in this miracle) can become the abode of evil spirits, and be actuated by them in the same way as human beings, it would seem to intimate that demoniac possession does not fasten on the highest part of our complex nature : that the spirit of man, that part of us by which alone we approach to God, and which in beasts is wanting, cannot be touched by the indwelling of any evil agent. It is the animal, not the spiritual, part of our nature which possession interfered with of old, interferes with now, if possession still exist. The malignant and destructive acts prompted by it have not, therefore, the true nature of sin. And possibly the entrance of the demons into the herd of swine may have been permitted by our Lord for the very pur- pose of exhibiting this consoling truth, as well as for the purpose of proving the objective reality of demoniac possession. For such a purpose, the destruction of the swine, which has been so much harped on by unbelievers, was a very cheap sacrifice. And certainly the objection to the transaction on the score of cruelty in depriving so many innocent animals of life, comes with a very bad grace from vivisectionists, who, for the purpose, as they allege, of advancing science, do not scruple to inflict death by lingering and horrible tortures on thousands and tens of thousands of animals.
In striking contrast to Professor Huxley's whole style and bearing on the subject of Christianity and the character of Christ, are the utterances of a real philosopher, the late J. Stuart Mill, a man whose tenderness of nature and fairness of mind were not extinguished by the fatal bias of his educa- tion. That his mind was slowly righting itself from the effects of this bias seems to be indicated by his posthumous essays, in which he appears to me to be "not far from the kingdom of God." Surely the stroke of untimely death cannot have destroyed " the stream of tendency " in a mind so fair, so
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