Such was this great succession in the apostolate of science:
evidently no other has ever shown itself more directly under
Divine grace, illumination, and guidance. It had given to the
world what might have been one of its greatest blessings.[[99]]
This evolution of divine truth was interrupted by theology.
There set into the early Church a current of belief which was
destined to bring all these noble acquisitions of science and
religion to naught, and, during centuries, to inflict tortures,
physical and mental, upon hundreds of thousands of innocent men
and women--a belief which held its cruel sway for nearly eighteen
centuries; and this belief was that madness was mainly or largely
possession by the devil.
This idea of diabolic agency in mental disease had grown
luxuriantly in all the Oriental sacred literatures. In the series
of Assyrian mythological tablets in which we find those legends
of the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and other early conceptions
from which the Hebrews so largely drew the accounts wrought into
the book of Genesis, have been discovered the formulas for
driving out the evil spirits which cause disease.
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