Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/55

Rh disappeared from the Bavarian statute books, and by being thus removed from the jurisdiction of both secular and ecclesiastical tribunals was robbed of its most baneful character, it has not ceased to haunt the imaginations of men, and the belief in it continues to be fostered by the Catholic Church both in papal encyclicals and in popular literature. Perhaps the most recent instance of this survival of mediævalism in one of the chief centers of modern civilization and scientific culture occurred on March 15, 1897, at Munich, Bavaria, where a Catholic priest of St. Benedict's Church solemnly went through the ceremony of exorcising a demon that haunted a house at No. 24 Park Street in that city. It seems that the evil spirit had disturbed the pious inmates of the dwelling by groaning, sighing, and making such a racket generally that it was impossible for them to sleep, and was seen one night by a child passing through the room in the disguise of an old woman dressed in black, evidently a survival of the race of ugly and ill-starred hags who have played such a melancholy part in the tragic annals of witchcraft. On receiving this information the parish priest and his acolytes went at once to the house with aspergills and censers to expel the infernal intruder by the supernal power inherent in holy water and consecrated incense. The event caused considerable sensation in the Bavarian capital and excited mingled feelings of indignation and disgust in the minds of even many good Catholics.

Lest we should pride ourselves on our superior enlightenment and freedom from the thralls of mediæeval supernaturalism, it would be well to remember that on January 6, 1897, Satan was burned in effigy in New York, to the loud shouting and singing of jubilant Salvationists. Of the two performances, we must confess that the low-toned and almost unintelligible mutterings of the sacerdotal exorcist in Munich, arrayed in gorgeous ecclesiastical robes and armed with the approved apparatus of incantation, was by far the more dignified and impressive, and, considered merely as a pageant, had a certain picturesqueness which was wholly absent from the crude and vulgar exhibition at the headquarters of the Salvation Army in West Fourteenth Street.

One curious and questionable feature of such survivals of mediævalism as that just witnessed in Bavaria, is the kind of evidence on which they rest. In most cases it is some child who sees the apparition and reports it, and whose word is accepted as conclusive. In the forest at Planegg, near Munich, is a little church