Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/204

 and I was able to witness the rest of the impious and idolatrous ceremony with something approaching indifference.

But of course the good dean was perfectly right; and not only this poor foolish woman but the whole population of the country was no doubt sunken in the grossest sacramentalism—which is but another name for superstition. These deluded people believed, as we know, that dreams warned them of future events, that lunatics were persons possessed of devils, that the sick could be cured by bathing in holy wells, that the Spirit of God could be given by the imposition of human hands, that the diseased were made well, and the evil spirits expelled by "handkerchiefs and aprons" which had been touched by Paul, who himself credited such superstitions as witchcraft and the Evil Eye.

I need not tell you that such conceptions as these are utterly and completely foreign to all Protestant teaching with which I am acquainted; we no longer believe that the sick in body or mind can be