Note 121 — MADELEY. (continued 2)

We have before us an octavo book, of a hundred pages, written as late as 1820, by James Heaton, entitled “The Demon Expelled.” In his introduction he laments that Christians have of late years “lightly ridiculed the existence of apparitions, witches, and demoniacs.” In the days of our fathers, venerable divines and “learned men, ornaments of the church and the state,” he tells us, believed in these things, and he quotes Wesley, Samuel Clarke, and others in support of his views. He commences by gravely telling us that the boy “had been frightened by being shut up by himself in a school, that he had been blistered all over the head, bled repeatedly, and was taking medicines, and that these produced fainting, profuse perspiration, and sickness. They prayed and sang around him for four or five hours at a stretch, twenty or thirty of them at a time, the boy being tied down to prevent him running away, till at last the lad refused to hold a testament in his hands, and the sight of a hymn-book put him into convulsions. Although seven preachers and thirty other people were present, praying and singing did not avail till they adjured the evil spirit, mentally, telling him to depart, and after arguing and talking to them for some time through the lad’s nose the demon finally took his departure.”