The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. Evans Edward Payson
the fire has been “prepared” for them, a form of expression which leads us to infer that they were not yet in it. Again the devils, which Christ drove out of the two “exceeding fierce” demoniacs, protested against such interference, saying, “Art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” This question has no significance, unless we suppose that they had a right to inhabit such living beings as had been assigned to them, until the time of their torment should come on the last day. Père Bougeant is furthermore of the opinion that, when these devils were sent miraculously and therefore abnormally into the swine, they came into conflict with the devils already in possession of the pigs, and thus caused the whole herd to run violently down a steep place into the sea. Even a hog, he thinks, could not stand it to harbour more than one devil at a time, and would be driven to suicide by having an intrinsic and superfluous demon conjured into it. A still more explicit and decisive declaration on this point is found in the Epistle of Jude and the Second Epistle of Peter, where it is stated that the angels which kept not their first estate the Lord hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. These words are to be understood figuratively as referring to the irrevocableness of their doom and the durance vile to which they are meanwhile subjected. That they are held in some sort of temporary custody and are not actually undergoing, but still awaiting the punishment, which divine justice has imposed upon them, the sacred scriptures and the teachings of the Church leave no manner of doubt.
Now the question arises as to what these legions of devils are doing in the meantime. Some of them are engaged in “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it,” in order to spy out and take advantage of human infirmities. God himself makes use of them to test the fealty of men and their power of holding fast to their integrity under severe temptations, just as the Creator made fossils and concealed them in the different strata of the earth, in order to see whether Christian faith in the truth of revelation would be strong enough to resist the seductions of “science falsely so called.” Other devils enter into living human bodies and give themselves up to evil enchantments as wizards and witches; others still reanimate corpses or assume the form and features of the dead and wander about as ghosts and hobgoblins. Not only were pagans regarded by the Christian Church as devil-worshippers and exorcised before being baptized, but it is also a logical deduction from the doctrine of original sin, that a devil takes possession of every child as soon as it is born and remains there until expelled by an ecclesiastical functionary, who combines the office of priest with that of conjurer and is especially appointed for this purpose. Hence arose the necessity of abrenunciation, as it was called, which preceded baptism in the Catholic Church and which Luther and the Anglican reformers retained. Before the candidate was christened he was exorcised and adjured personally, if an adult, or through a sponsor, if an infant, to “forsake the devil and all his works.” These words, which still hold a place in the ritual, but are now repeated in a perfunctory manner by persons, who have no conception of the magic potency formerly ascribed to them, are a survival of the old formula of exorcism. In the seventeenth century there was a keen competition between the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran clergy in casting out devils, the former claiming that to them alone had been transmitted the exorcising power conferred by Christ upon his apostles. The Protestant churches finally gave up the hocus-pocus and during the eighteenth century it fell into general discredit and disuse among them, although some of the stiffest and most conservative Lutherans never really abandoned it in principle and have recently endeavoured to revive it in practice.
The Catholic Church, on the contrary, still holds that men, women and cattle may be possessed by devils and prescribes the means of their expulsion. In a work entitled Rituale ecclesiasticum ad usum clericorum S. Fransisci by Pater Franz Xaver Lohbauer (Munich, 1851), there is a chapter on the mode of helping those who are afflicted by demons (Modus juvandi afflictos a daemone). The author maintains that nearly all so-called nervous diseases, hysteria, epilepsy, insanity, and milder forms of mental alienation, are either the direct result of diabolical agencies or attended and greatly aggravated by them. A sound mind in a sound body may make a man devil-proof, but Satan is quick to take advantage of his infirmities in order to get possession of his person. The adversary is constantly lying in wait watching for and trying to produce physical derangements as breaches in the wall, through which he may rush in and capture the citadel of the soul. In all cases of this sort the priest is to be called in with the physician, and the medicines are to be blessed and sprinkled with holy water before being administered. Exorcisms and conjurations are not only to be spoken over the patient, but also to be written on slips of consecrated paper and applied, like a plaster, to the parts especially affected. The physician should keep himself supplied with these written exorcisms, to be used when it is impossible for a priest to be present. As with patent medicines, the public is warned against counterfeits, and no exorcism is genuine unless it is stamped with the seal and bears the signature of the bishop of the diocese. According to Father Lohbauer, the demon is the efficient cause of the malady, and there can be no cure until the evil one is cast out. This is the office of the priest; the physician then heals the physical disorder, repairing the damage done to the body, and, as it were, stopping the gaps with his drugs so as to prevent the demon from getting in again. Thus science and religion are reconciled and work together harmoniously for the healing of mankind.
The Catholic Church has a general form of Benedictio a daemone vexatorum, for the relief of those vexed by demons; and Pope Leo XIII., who was justly esteemed as a man of more than ordinary intelligence and more thoroughly imbued with the modern spirit than any of his predecessors, composed and issued, November 19, 1890, a formula of Exorcismus in Satanam et Angelos Apostatas worthy of a place in any mediæval collection of conjurations. His Holiness never failed to repeat this exorcism in his daily prayers, and commended it to the bishops and other clergy as a potent means of warding off the assaults of Satan and of casting out devils. In 1849 the Bishop of Passau published a Manuale Benedictionum, and as late as 1893 Dr. Theobald Bischofberger described and defended the practice of the papal see, in this respect, in a brochure printed in Stuttgart and entitled Die Verwaltung des Exorcistats nach Massgabe der römischen Benediktionale.
That these formulas are still deemed highly efficacious is evident from the many recent cases in which they have been employed. Thus in 1842 a devil named Ro-ro-ro-ro took possession of “a maiden of angelic beauty” in Luxemburg and was cast out by Bishop Laurentius. This demon claimed to be one of the archangels expelled from heaven, and appears to have rivalled Parson Stöcker and Rector Ahlwardt in Anti-semitic animosity; when the name of Jesus was mentioned, he cried out derisively: “O, that Jew! Didn’t he have to drink gall?” When commanded to depart, he begged that he might go into some Jew. The bishop, however, refused to give him leave and bade him “go to hell,” which he forthwith did, “moaning as he went, in melancholy tones, that seemed to issue from the bowels of the earth, ‘Burning, burning, everlastingly burning in hell!’ The voice was so sad,” adds the bishop, “that we should have wept for sheer compassion, had we not known that it was the devil.”
Again, a lay brother connected with an educational institute in Rome became diabolically possessed on January 3, 1887, and was exorcised by Father Jordan. In this instance the leading spirit was Lucifer himself, attended by a host of satellites, of whom Lignifex, Latibor, Monitor, Ritu, Sefilie, Shulium, Haijunikel, Exaltor, and Reromfex were the most important. It took about an hour and a half to cast out these demons the first time, but they renewed their assaults on February 10th, 11th, and 17th, and were not completely discomfited and driven back into the infernal regions until February 23rd, and then only by using the water of Lourdes, which, as Father Jordan states, acted upon them like poison, causing them to writhe to and fro. Lucifer was especially rude and saucy in his remarks. Thus, for example, when Father Jordan said, “Every knee in heaven and on the earth shall bow to the name of Jesus,” the fallen “Son of the Morning” retorted, “Not Luci, not Luci – never!”
It would be easy to multiply authentic reports of things of this sort that have happened within the memory of the present generation, such as the exorcism of a woman of twenty-seven at Laas in the Tyrol in the spring of 1892, and the expulsion of an evil spirit from a boy ten years of age at Wemding in Bavaria by a capuchin, Father Aurelian, July 13th and 14th, 1891, with the sanction of the bishops of Augsburg and Eichstätt. In the latter case we have a circumstantial account of the affair by the exorcist himself, who, in conclusion, uses