I may not turn aside to open this very remarkable passage,[ cannot quote it without observing, as I pass, what testimony it beareth to the truth that diabolical possessions were really and substantially so, and not merely diseases of lunacy and madness expressed after an Eastern way. For what meaning were there of a disease leaving a man and walking through dry places, seeking rest and finding none; and going and fetching seven other diseases more wicked than himself, and with them returning and entering into the man from which he, the diseased, had been cast out? Moreover, this passage proves that the Jews in general believed the demoniacs to be really possessed with other spirits than their own, because it is used by our Lord as an illustration; and no man chooseth to illustrate his subject by a thing of whose reality or truth the hearers stand in doubt; for that were only to add perplexity to perplexity and uncertainty to uncertainty. He is illustrating the case and condition into which the Jewish nation was about, by unbelief, to hring itself; and he likeneth that generation to the very person before him, out of whom he had just cast a devil; declaring, that, if the devil which had gone forth of him should wander about, and, finding no other tenement, bring seven other disciples with him, and, entering to his former house, the body of this man, should find it ready to admit him, and by wickedness prepared to welcome him and obey him, and thereupon with all the seven should take up his old quarters, and make the latterend of that man worse than the beginning; this would be a very apt illustration of the condition to which that nation was about to be reduced; out of which the demons had, as it were, been expelled by the knowledge of the true God, but into which, not one, but many were about to enter, for their rejection of the Son of God and of the Holy Ghost, and exceedingly to vex and torment them. This illustration, addressed to the cavillers with whom he was surrounded, is indeed enough to convince me that the possession of devils is not only a fact in itself, but was a fact universally admitted, even by the most sceptical of that generation; who never said, 'They are not devils which he casteth out,' but “He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils." But the object for which I quoted this passage was to shew that the fact here brought before us, of many devils dwelling in the person of one man, was a point so commonly believed in those times as to be made use of by our Lord for the illustration of other points not so obvious in themselves, or so commonly held by the people. Now those devils went forth from the poor maniac, and possessed themselves of the unclean bodies of the swine which were feeding by the lake: and such was the madness with which the brutal creatures were taken, to find themselves so invaded, that, against all natural desire of life, they hurried do wn the steep

mount and plunged into the sea, and were choked. This of itself, were there no other reason, would be sufficient to shew us the reality of these diabolical possessions. For who ever heard of the lunacy of a man leaving him and seizing upon the brute creatures? These are diseases of the reason of man, and proper only to man, who is reasonable. They cannot by infection be communicated; they cannot be transferred to a dumb and brutal creature; for reason is essential to their very existence: there must be reason before there can be the derangement of reason. Reason is the substance, and the diseases of lunacy and mania are but the accidents of it. Now how, when the substance is not present, the accidents may yet be present, I confess myself wholly unable to fathom. So that, if an instance had been chosen on very purpose to teach us the reality of these demoniacal possessions, this is that very instance. It is what the logicians call the experimentum crucies, that upon which the whole issue may be rested. And therefore it is, that I have opened these Lectures by sifting this question to the bottom, and shewing the absurdity of the opinion which hath been broached within the last fifty years, and is, I fear, so widely spread in the church; and henceforth I shall consider it as a point set at rest, and in all future Lectures proceed upon it as undoubted. We do not grudge to have dwelt upon this point at length in this Lecture; for I would wish to establish you thoroughly in the faith of these things, that you may have a reason of the faith that is in you, to give to every man; and because this subject of expelling the demons, is one of the capital objects of our Lord's ministry.

II. Having shewn that these demoniacal possessions were truly produced by the presence and abiding of evil spirits in the bodies of men, and that the attempts of these sceptical times to explain them away into forms of disease, such as lunacy or madness, are at once shallow, fruitless, and wicked, we proceed now to consider what information we have in the Scripture concerning those evil spirits which were permitted of God to hold men under their miserable thraldom. And first of all, in order that the unlearned may be guarded against a mistake to which the learned are not exposed, it is to be observed, and borne in mind by you, that the name of these evil spirits is always and altogether a different word from the name of Satan, or the devil; who hath many appellations-as, the evil one, the tempter, the adversary, the great dragon, the old serpent, &c.-but never, in any one instance, the appellation of demon, by which these spirits are always named, and by which word they should certainly have been named in our version of the Bible. Satan, or the devil, is always one; but these are many: he is the prince of the wicked

and the accuser of the righteous, the great antagonist of God and leader of the powers of evil; no doubt, also, the head of these demons, as of all other wicked beings; but not their immediate prince, who is frequently declared in the Gospel to be Beelzebub: " By Beelzebub, the prince of the demons, he casteth the demons out." Yet that Beelzebub and all his order look unto Satan, as the vassal to his liege-lord, there can be no doubt, from the reply which our Lord made to that railing accusation, as you have it written in the third chapter of Mark : "How can Satan cast out Satan? and if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. No man can enter into a strong man's house and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man, and then he will spoil his goods:" which words do manifestly both give unto Satan the supremacy of the kingdom, and represent these demons as a part of the house over which he is the strong and powerful master. So also is it said by Simon Peter, when preaching the Gospel unto Cornelius and his household, that Christ" went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil :" from which word we learn that Satan, who is at the bottom of all mischief, a liar and the father of it, was regarded by the Apostle as the great cause and acknowledged head, not only of all their demoniacal possessions, but also of all the sore sufferings and cruel diseases from which our Lord in the days of his flesh went about to deliver the children of Abraham. And the same is taught in that which he said of the woman who was oppressed with a spirit of infirmity: "This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound these eighteen years." You will not understand us, therefore, as dividing the empire of evil into two parts, refusing to Satan the bad supremacy thereof, when, for the sake of pursuing our inquiry into the nature of these evil angels of his, properly called demons, we bear in mind that the two are ever preserved distinct in Scripture, as Christ and his disciples, as God and angels: and doubt there can be. none, that what the angels are to God in the good government of the unfallen universe, and what believers are to Christ in the dispensation of his grace, these demons, and Beelzebub their prince, with all other the orders of the wicked hierarchy, are to Satan, the prince of the power of the air, the prince of the darkness of this world, and the subtle monarch of the spiritual wickednesses in high places.

Concerning these demons, then, let us inquire into the effects which they wrought upon the persons of whom they had gotten the possession. And, first, upon their bodies they had power; and did delight to take away from them their senses, both of sight and hearing, and also the faculty of speech: which being the three great means of human intercourse and brotherly communion, of instruction also, and consolation, do prove to

us the solitary and selfish malignity of these reprobate spirits, who, having gotten hold of their victim, proceed to shut out from him the whole world of light and love, and to make of him a living tomb, in the darkness and misery of which they may do all their cruel work. While the conscious spirit of their poor victim hath any mode of communion with this world of hope and grace and knowledge, they feel their possession insecure, and, like the cursed Inquisition, of which no doubt, as we may shew in the sequel they were the secret instigators, they must first put out the eye of knowledge, then close up the ear of hearing counsel, and make mute the tongue of revelation, in order that upon the miserable man, thus cut off from his kind, and from the privilege of heaven's light, and the divine faculty of discourse, they may, in the dark chamber of their machinations and the secret dungeon of their horrid cruelty, proceed to do their utmost violence and most injurious torments. Accordingly, these demons, when they had so far obtained the mastery would cast their disguised victim into the fire, to burn him; or into the water, to drown him; or upon the earth, to wound him and leave him wallowing in the filth thereof; or they would set the nobler organs of life within into such violent agitation that he should wrestle with the pain, and foam at the mouth, and be convulsed beyond the endurance of human sight. They would strip him stark-naked, that he might be the more pinched by the nightly cold, and scorched by the daily heat, and wet with the dews of heaven. They would hunt him from the habitations of man, and make him the hungry raging keeper of the wastes and wilds of nature; or carry him to the charnel-house, to dwell among the tombs, and haunt them with fearful superstition and real terrors; and raise him into such fury that he should take weapons against himself, to cut and carve his quick and living flesh, as if he were a dead or inanimate thing. By all which particulars of distress there is evinced in these demons a general disposition to cruelty, and delight in pain for its own sake. To do evil, to produce suffering, to rack and torment, but never to destroy; to accumulate the greatest load of pure suffering which nature can endure without dying; this is the law of their being. We have no instance recorded in which they destroyed their victim by any of their excessive torments; for then their occupation were ended; which fear of being cast out into the void abyss from the tenantry of a living thing, moved them to pray our Lord to give them a shelter in the body of the brutes. But the swine, not having that power of self-preserva tion which man hath, no sooner felt themselves stung with such demoniacal instinct, than they rushed right on to destruction. It may give us some idea of the quick and stinging presence of these evil spirits, to observe with what wild haste this herd of harassed creatures rushed into the deep. It could be no disease

with them, no unaccountable sympathy, no bewildered reason, no disorganized will: they were feeding quietly upon the mountain side; but no sooner did the legion of demons enter into them with their insufferable torment, than they rushed amain upon death, and plunged down the precipice into the sea. Here again we observe the use of this miracle, in proving to us not only the reality of these possessions, but the torment, the bodily torment, the torture to animal life, which it is the nature of these demons to inflict upon all on whom they have got possession. And now, brethren, if such be the cruel and vindictive nature of a spirit which is placed beyond the region of grace and hope and the possibility of redemption, under the fearful sentence of reprobation, I conclude that such will be the natural instinct and office of the spirits of the wicked, who are separated from the spirits of the righteous by a gulf across which they cannot pass: for they are then beyond redemption, past all remedy of grace, and reserved, like those evil angels, in chains of darkness until the judgment of the great day: and when, at the judgment of the great day, each one of them shall receive a body to wound and grieve and torture, and which cannot die, what shall we say of the anguish of bodily misery which such a tenant will continue to inflict for ever, and will for ever be fed and nourished with the power of endurance. Well might our Lord Well might our Lord say, "Where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched; where there is weeping and wailing and guashing of teeth." I cannot describe, and if I could I have not space for describing, the aspect of fearful misery which this reflection openeth up to me in the condition of the reprobate; the misery, the unrelenting misery, which a spirit thus infuriated, and a body thus endowed, will engender between themselves; and which no name is worthy to represent, save that word in Scripture, the second death-the perpetual torments of a death which cannot die.

Let us consider, now, the nature of that knowledge with which these demons endowed the minds of those whom they possessed. We shewed above, that the knowledge which these demoniacs had of our Lord's person was superhuman, and the Lord himself doth every time ascribe their insight to the demons, and never to the crazy subject of their evil influence. Now, if we inquire into the use which they made of it, we shall always find it to have been for evil, and never for good; always for the end of marring, never for the end of promoting the great work which he came to fulfil, and in fulfilling which he proceeded with the greatest wisdom and discretion. To have avowed himself openly as the Son of God, before he had made out his credentials by fulfilling the things written of him in the Prophets and the Psalms, would have brought down upon his head, in the first beginnings of his ministry, that persecution and death