Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/456

440 All honor to this work and to the men who engaged in it; but, as a rule, these establishments were few and poor, compared with those for other diseases, and they usually degenerated into madhouses, where devils were cast out mainly by cruelty.

The first main weapon against the indwelling Satan continued to be the exorcism; but, under the influence of inferences from Scripture farther and farther fetched, and of theological reasoning more and more subtle, it became something very different from the gentle procedure of earlier times, and some description of this great weapon at the time of its highest development will throw light on the laws which govern the growth of theological reasoning, as well as upon the main subject in hand.

A fundamental premise in the fully developed exorcism was that, according to sacred Scripture, a main characteristic of Satan is pride. Pride led him to rebel—for pride he was cast down; therefore the first thing to do, in driving him out of a lunatic, was to strike a fatal blow at this pride—to disgust him.

This theory was carried out logically, to the letter. The treatises on the subject simply astound one by their wealth of epithets—blasphemous and obscene—which it was allowable for the exorcist to use in casting out devils. The "Treasury of Exorcisms" contains hundreds of pages packed with the vilest epithets which the worst imagination could invent for the purpose of overwhelming the indwelling Satan.

Some of those decent enough to be printed in these degenerate days ran as follows:

"Thou lustful and stupid one, ... thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure, ... thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly, ... thou mad