Telepathy: A Vulgar Delusion

FOR years, the Psychical Research Societies have been lending countenance and an air of respectability to the grossest superstitions: belief in ghosts, clairvoyance, haunted houses, poltergeists, apports, ectoplasm, premonitions of the dying, and other sordid delusions.

Now comes Mr. W.H. Salter, Hon. Secretary of the British Society for Psychical Research, and, in an "answer" to the unanswerable argument of Surgeon-Rear Admiral Charles M. Beadnell in the Literary Guide for September, 1943, makes a plea for that vulgar delusion: telepathy.

We are no more impressed by the "big names" that have defended telepathy than by the "big names" (Gladstone, the Duke of Argyle, and Mary Pickford) who have defended Christianity. We are interested solely in facts.

For years, this writer (as a matter of "duty" to himself) wasted a precious lot of time studying the reports of the P.R.S.
In no series of papers are to be found more self-evidential material of downright dishonesty, outright lying, and a silly esteem for every type of voodoo enchantment and jungle witchcraft than these papers reveal. They are a disgrace to intelligence.

"No psychical researcher professes to know everything about telepathy," says Mr. Salter. Now, isn't that nice of him? If they knew anything at all about telepathy, they would put it to work, not in the Society's "proceedings" or in Sunday supplements, but in the world of practical demonstration.

When Marconi told the world he could send messages without the use of wires, he proved it. Today a billion-dollar industry is build on wireless telegraphy. How much is invested in telepathy? Today, after 60 years of "investigation", telepathy can't erect a single sending and receiving station. There isn't a banking house in the world -- and bankers are quick to grasp at anything that will "work" -- which would back a telepathy station or risk a German mark on any of the thought-transference didos of the psychical researchers.

After 60 years of telepathy, we still use the telephone and the telegraph, write millions of letters a year, and spend a billion dollars in needless postage when we could just as well be "thinking" our thoughts to others. Even Mr. Salter must convey his thoughts to us by means of the printed page.

Hans Driesch and Charles Richet were no more qualified to pass judgement on the "evidence" of telepathy than anyone who can analyze and think. They were, by temperament, less qualified, in fact, than thousands of scientific workers who reject telepathy and whose critical judgment is not impaired by a predisposition to swallow anything. If pressed to prove it, I will show that both Driesch and Richet were, in these matters, gullible fools.

Psychological research societies can exist only so long as they are able to feed on current superstitions. They thrive on credulity. Where would they be today if there were no victims of hallucinations, religious neurotics, ghost-chasing crackpots, hysterical subjects, and psychopathic "visionaries" on whom to base their reports? Long ago, Joseph Jastrow made a remark that is as valid today as when it was written: Create a belief in anything and the "facts" will create themselves. There are thousands of Christian Scientists today (not to mention a slough of Spiritualists) who will testify to whatever is required. Is Mr. Salter so naive as to believe that men will not lie?

"The imposing mass of evidence has convinced almost everyone who has studied it that telepathy occurs," says Mr. Salter. But has it? We haven't heard that the British Association or the American Association for the Advancement of Science has gone on record as endorsing telepathy.

When they do, telepathy will have made its first progress in sixty years.

St. Patricks "Gift" To Ireland

WHOEVER got the assignment to prepare the editorial on St. Patrick's for the New York Times on March 17, did a perfect job of rhetorical gush-writing for the Catholic Church. If the patron saint of Ireland were with us in the flesh it is doubtful whether he would recognize himself as the hero of the following blurb:

"Today, perhaps, as we recall again his gift of Christianity to Ireland that was to preserve the treasure of ancient civilization when the foundations of older Rome had fled, he may seem our contemporary in a stricken world."

Setting aside the sloppy diction of the editorial (we have heard of "foundations" that "crumble" and "collapse", but never of those that are known to have "fled"), we may remark that there is nothing in St. Patrick's life to suggest that he was interested in the preservation of "ancient civilization". What he was concerned about was preaching an Asiatic creed which he believed would save men from the wrath of God and eternal damnation.

If Christianity is St. Patrick's "gift" to Ireland, the noted saint should be burned in effigy by every self-respecting Hibernian. What he brought to Ireland was the hang-over of an abominable superstition, hatched in ancient Israel by an insufferable tribe of Bedouin barbarians, whose culture for the most part, as measured even by the standards of the time, was abysmally low.

St. Patrick's "gift" to Ireland was a hodgepodge of mythology and ignorance which he had imbibed as a child. In early life, infused with Christian fervor and beholding visions, he sought to displace the religion of the Druids with the religion of Christ. Like Jacques Bossuet, a French bishop and historian of a later period, St. Patrick saw in the sacred delusions of a Semitic tribe a divine revelation which was to redeem the world.

In referring to the obsessions of Bossuet, the English historian Buckle observes:

"Because Bossuet had been taught that the Jews are the chosen people of God, he under the title of Universal History, almost confines his attention to them, and treats this obstinate and ignorant race as if they formed the pivot upon which the affairs of the universe had been made to turn. His idea of a universal history excludes those nations who were the first to reach civilization, and to some of whom the Hebrews owed the scanty knowledge which they subsequently acquired. He says little of the Persians, and less of the Egyptians; nor does he even mention that far greater people between the Indus and the Ganges, whose philosophy formed one of the elements of the school of Alexandria, whose subtle speculations anticipated all the efforts of European metaphysics, and whose sublime inquiries, conducted in their own exquisite language, date from a period when the Jews, stained with every variety of crime, were a plundering and vagabond tribe, wandering on the face of the earth, raising their hand against every man, and ever man raising his hand against them."

How different might have been the history of Ireland if St. Patrick's "gift" had come from the pagan world, with its rich treasures of literature and learning. The classical culture of the Greek and Roman civilizations, with its love of knowledge and inquiry, its appreciation of art and drama, its unsurpassable glorification of wisdom and intellectual liberty would have raised the Emerald Isle to something less pathetic than a broken reed among the nations of the world. Intellectually pauperized, Ireland has suffered more from her venal priesthood and groveling superstition than from her plagues and famines.

If Irishmen had a tenth of the wit and sense of humor they are said to have (there is, I understand, a little Irish somewhere along the line of my antecedents), they would have long ago laughed the Catholic Church out of existence, ridiculed its ludicrous and asinine doctrines, its crass stupidities, its priestly arrogance. They would have scorned the idea that a small and obscure cult, masquerading as the elite of heaven, had been favored by the Almighty with a divine revelation while they, the Irish, were left to gather the crumbs of Hebraic tradition.

St. Patrick, if he existed (and there is considerable controversy among scholars as to whether or not he lived), is anything but a commanding figure in the pages of history and would hardly have called for laudation by the Times had it not been for journalistic expediency. He was not a scholar, a thinker, even a man of moderate culture; his alleged "Confessions" stamp him as an intellectual nonentity, possessed of enough fanatical zeal and muscular vigor to instill an Oriental superstition into the social blood stream of an alien people. "Various charges," says the Encyclopedia Britannica, "had been brought against him by his enemies, among them that of illiteracy, the truth of which is borne out by the crudeness of his style, and is fully admitted by the writer himself."

But a saint does not have to be literate to meet religious standards; it is enough that he have "spiritual insight," a flair for the mystical, the ability to see and converse with spooks. If he has these, he will not only fulfill, as St. Patrick did, the requirements of the Church, but merit the awe and adoration of its insatiable dupes. His emotional instability will more than compensate for anything he may lack in intellectual experience.

Our venerable New York Times could have done better than laud a vulgar superstitionist. If it wished to pay tribute to Irish glory and intelligence, it could have signaled out worthy individuals, such as Tyndall, the scientist, Bury, the historian, and the scholar, Joseph McCabe. These men, born in Ireland and interested in preserving the treasures of civilization, will be remembered in cultural circles long after Patrick, the pious ignoramus, is buried in oblivion.

Whitewashing The Infamous

A NUMBER of lectures delivered by Sir. Richard Gregory during his recent visit to this country have been incorporated in a book entitled "Religion in Science and Civilization". As works from Dr. Gregory's pen are deserving of serious attention, I procured the volume, .anticipating that it would measure up to the high standard of his studies in pure science. It did--in all respects save in those portions which treat of the conflict between science and religion. Here, unfortunately, the author loses the historical perspective.

The book, for the most part, in dealing with religion, takes a conciliatory attitude. It is written more in the "appeasement" tempo of a Chamberlain than in the vigorous manner of a Churchill telling the enemy where to get off. Unconsciously, perhaps, though nevertheless with fatal concessions to reactionary beliefs, Dr. Gregory engages in dainty flirtations with the forces of regression; for some unaccountable reason, he hopes to save Christianity from the stigma of being opposed to science.

"The mistake has been, and still is," says Dr. Gregory, "to make the conflict between Christianity and science instead of between obscurantism and enlightenment.

The mistake here is in thinking of Christianity as anything but obscurantism at its worst. If science is opposed to "obscurantism" (as Dr. Gregory holds it is), then science is in deadly conflict with Christianity. Nothing can nullify the fact that without the miracles of Jesus, the claim that he was the Son of God, that he died for men's sins, that he raised persons from the dead, and that only he can salvage us from damnation, the Church is meaningless. Science is in conflict with these ideas as clearly as it is with the claim that Father Divine is God or that the Pope is "infallible".

What is Christianity, in substance, but the reputed doctrines of Jesus? Jesus, if the Gospel stories are true, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Is there anything in science today, as known to Dr. Gregory, to support these fantastic teachings? Positively not; Dr. Gregory is aware, as an astronomer and a physicist, that they clash with science; he need only note that they are Christian doctrines hopelessly in conflict with biological and astronomical knowledge.

Works such as Draper's "History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion" and White's "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom" says Dr. Gregory, "are melancholy reading today, for they are largely concerned with problems and influences which no longer exist, though at the time they evoked bitter discussion."

It will be time enough to talk about these books being out of date when the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England go out of business. If there is "melancholy reading today", it is furnished by that type of writer who is blissfully unaware of the mountainous mass of nonsense preached in Christian churches and of the singular devotion which thousands of our clergy display in their work of muddling science.

Dr. Gregory clearly recognizes the fact that "crude and cruel conceptions of religion" are still held by large Christian communities; and are believed to be justified by literal interpretations of Biblical texts." This being so, how can he contend that these are not Christian doctrines or that they are not in conflict with science? It is just here that ill-considered thought leads him to the conclusion that the battle is over, that the works of Draper and White, depicting the struggle, are antiquated and unworthy of consideration at this time. Quite the opposite is true; seldom has there been greater need to emphasize the fact that Christianity and science are irreconcilable enemies, that a Munich peace-pact is out of the question, and that war must go on until one side or the other is vanquished.

The "crude and cruel teachings" against which Dr. Gregory protests are accepted today because they are found in the Bible and form a part of Christian church dogma. Hell is as hot a place today in Roman Catholic theology as ever before; if it simmers in Church of England circles, it is because some churchmen are becoming ashamed of the "gnashing-of-teeth" doctrine taught by the Hell-teaching Jesus. The Church of Rome still employs its purgatory racket over vast areas of the earth; Protestant Christianity still mulcts the public with the idea that it possesses a book of divine "revelation" and has something to offer in the way of personal "salvation" beyond the grave. The swindle goes on in all branches of the Christian Church.

"The tendency among enlightened leaders in the Church of England," writes Dr. Gregory, "is to ask for nothing more than belief in a Supreme Being.... These are advanced views, and professing Christians condemn them as almost blasphemous."

There is the rub; it is precisely because "advanced views" are condemned by "professing Christians" that we have the conflict.

Who but "professing Christians" today fight evolution and the Darwinian doctrine of our monkey descent? I can assure Dr. Gregory, on the best of authority, that a delegation of Catholic priests once called at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, to protest against its exhibit in the Hall of the Age of Man. It was a Christian attempt to intimidate its officials into withdrawing the exhibit.

Again, I can assure Dr. Gregory that, at Christmas time each year, the mythical "Star of Bethlehem" is played, up in an imbecilic exhibit at our Planetarium in New York, against the better judgment of its officials. Christians "like" it---and flock to get in. They cannot distinguish between stars shown in juxtaposition, shining brightly as a single Star, and the fake luminary in the Bible.that "went before them" and "stood over" a stable. The teachings of Jewish folklore still have most of our Christian population gaping at the stars with the intelligence of Cows.

It is useless to point out that some high-ups in the Church of England would be satisfied with just a simple faith in God on the part of their congregations. If they were, what would become of all the religious trappings, the mystical pomp, the anointing with oil, the miraculous element in Church rituals? Whatever may be the private beliefs of high churchmen concerning the Fall, the Virgin Birth, the Redemption, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus; it is the Church which is responsible for indoctrinating the multitude with these silly beliefs; it is too late now for the clergy to pull from under; they must ride along on the wave of infantile belief which Christianity is responsible for and which now, as before, constitutes the rank-and-file faith of those who looked to them for cultural leadership. Having filled them with superstition, the Church can survive only by keeping them that way; it will collapse like a house of cards once the people learn that they have been grossly deceived by Bible legends and mythology.

My learned friend Dr. M. Davidson of London, who reviews the book in "The Journal of the British Astronomical Association," very aptly observes, "It is difficult to see how Christianity could build a civilization and culture full of material wealth and rich in scientific attainments; it has never been able to do so, and there are good reasons for the view that the spread of Christianity undermined the foundations of the old Roman Empire."

There is no question that Dr. Davidson is right. The downfall of pagan Rome was followed by a thousand years or more of Christian "civilization," the like of which the World may hope never to see again. It was an era of moral debasement and intellectual coma in which the human animal reached an all-time low in cultural prostration. From the days of Constantine to the time it burned Vanini at the stake, Christianity marks the most brutalized period in the history of the world.

Christianity gave us the Dark Ages and the honors of the Holy Inquisition. If all "the loving kindness" which the pulpit prates about as of Christian origin could be put in a balance, it would weigh as nothing against the abysmal ignorance and stark brutality engendered by the Church. Who, by searching history, can find a glimmer of satisfaction in the dark days of Christianity's "triumph," with its bestial autos-da-fe, its witchcraft epidemics, its unspeakable atrocities?

In educated circles, Christianity is doomed. In the inner sanctum of scholarship it has failed to withstand even the serious onslaught of critical churchmen. Its doctrines have been riddled by science. On every side, it has been battered to a pulp by historical criticism. Those who wish to snatch a few crumbs of comfort from the debacle, can do so only by stooping intellectually, by truckling to the gutter level of popular ignorance. Only the political vote-snatcher and the tent revivalist will sink that low.

Christianity has never ceased to be an impediment to the world, fighting every advance in science and still standing as a recrudescence of crass superstition. The Bible still teaches the same nonsense it did in the days of Draper and White. Whether it is believed in today as much as it was before, is beside the point: the lip-service still goes on and it is this lip-service that makes for substantial opposition to the teachings of science. The obsession of Bible worship and Jesus adoration still has many of our professors frozen in their chairs; they dare not treat it, at least in public, with anything but Obsequious flattery or fawning servility.

Fundamentalism, both Catholic and Protestant, still exerts an enormous pressure on public and press. It is a bold editor or a careless politician who will utter a peep against entrenched Christianity. In spite of cultural progress, the rabble rules. Legislation is frequently enacted in deference to the mob. In some states of the Union it is illegal to teach the evolution of man in our public schools.

The conflict between religion and science is as deadly today as ever before. Tell the average group of Christians that they are descended from an ape, and see how far you get; they will deny their animal ancestry with more vehemence than if they are told they are descended from barbarians, or that their grandparents were horse-thieves. No one knows this better than our American paleontologist, Dr. W. K. Gregory, "Imagine the effect," says he, "of telling one-hundred-percent Americans that they are not the descendants of the god-like Adam but are sons and daughters of Dryopithecus, or of some nearly allied genus of anthropoid apes that lived in the Miocene age; --and that before that they had long tails and ate grubs and beetles !"

Every Catholic today is taught by his Church to believe that evolution is false. In its article on "Adam," the Catholic Encyclopaedia (Vol. 1, Rev. ed., 1936) teaches that the first man was created in an adult state. This is good biblical doctrine--and in conflict with science.

Dr. Gregory is as much interested in the social sciences as in the science of the stars. In what way, then, can the teachings of Jesus lead to the betterment of the world? Where would we be today if we followed the maudlin dictum of Jesus: "Resist not evil"? Our pacifists, our turn-the-other-cheekers, and our sentimental poltroons would have us face the aggressions of Hitler with the Christian doctrine of non-resistance. In judicial affairs, too, where would Christianity lead? No judge, sitting on the bench, could mete but justice if he took Jesus seriously, for fear of the teaching: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." No society, believing in Divine Providence and the crazy Jesus teaching of "take no thought for your life, what ye shall.eat or what ye shall drink" could survive for long. Such a teaching, if put into practice, would reduce a country to impecunious vagrants and tramps. Of what use is it to teach people to pray for what they want, on the promise that their prayers will be answered or that they will be clothed like the lilies of the field ?

The historian Buckle well recognized the futility of prayer, "We still see," said he, "the extraordinary spectacle of prayers offered up in our churches for dry weather or for wet weather; a superstition which to future ages will appear as childish as the feelings of pious awe with which our fathers regarded the presence of a Comet, or the approach of an eclipse."

Has the Church of England improved since Buckle wrote It has not. Its clergy still call for national days of prayer for the winning of the war, when every thoughtful Englishman knows the absurdity of prayer; yet the hypocrisy goes on as if the repetition of the act will in some way alter events. Only the final campaign, of course, will determine which side wins the conflict. Yet what would the Archbishop of Ganterbury do, for his £15,000 per year, if prayer were ditched?

Our medicine-men in America are not different from their British brethren of the cloth, Here prayers are offered up with the same degree of silly genuflection for the triumph of our arms; our last prayers for Peace were immediately followed by the Pearl Harbor disaster and the loss of Manila. Yet we are asked to assume a respectful attitude toward the leaders of the Church and of an institution whose charlatanism and appeal to magic belong to a medieval age.

Dr. Gregory commands an influential and honored position in the world of science. All the greater, therefore, is his obligation to make clear the attitude of science in relation to Christianity. Surely, as an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association of England, he is conversant with the literature of rationalism and of the tremendous part it has played in the long-drawn-out struggle between science and religion. He cannot, by any conceivable intent, wish to palliate, much less conceal, the debasing influence that Christianity has exerted in its befuddlement of the world and its enslavement of mankind. Yet his disposition, here and there, to defend the.indefensible, or to look the other way while the battle is on, is hardly in accordance with his own standards of scientific precision.

Dr. John W. Draper (whose book Dr. Gregory feels is tragically out of date) fully realized the struggle that is before us--a struggle that must enlist the very finest fiber of intellectual soldiery. And, no one, by natural endowment, belongs more fully to that army than Dr. Gregory himself.

"As to the issue of the coming conflict," wrote Dr. Draper, "can any one doubt? Whatever is resting on fiction and fraud will be overthrown. Institutions that organize impostures and spread delusions must show what right they have to exist. Faith must render an account of herself to Reason. Mysteries must give plate to facts. Religion must relinquish that imperious, that domineering position which she has so long maintained against Science. There must be absolute, freedom of thought."

These are the words of one whose intellectual vision permitted him to see the conflict as a whole a conflict that is still with us, and which by the spread of culture, can end only in the demolition of Christianity.

Years ago, writing in the "Fortnightly Review", Viscount Morley stated the outcome with singular precision :-

"You have so debilitated the minds of men and women that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the yoke of your superstition. But we promise you they shall be years of strenuous battle . . . The great ship of your church, once so stout and fair, has become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk with warped planks and sere canvas; and you who work it are not more than the ghosts of dead men; and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink like lead or stone to the deepest bottom."

Christianity and Insanity

ONE of the saddest chapters in human history is that which describes the cruel manner in which the insane were treated in times past. Notwithstanding that it is happily a thing of the past, it will be instructive to inquire from what causes the barbarous usage sprang; for it was not common to all nations and all times; on the contrary, it had its birth in the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages of Christian Europe.
--DR. HENRY MAUDSLEY, Responsibility is a Mental Disease, p 6.

THERE is no bigger blot on the pages of history than Christianity's treatment of the insane. "The insane," says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "were frequently tortured, scourged, and even burned to death."

In ancient Egypt and Greece, the mentally sick were treated as victims of disease. They were cared for kindly and intelligently, while music and art were employed to quiet the nerves. With these sedatives went occupational activities of a diversional or recreational nature. Crude as some of the early methods were, they were nevertheless based on a sane and sober realization of the pathological condition underlying lunacy. It was left to Christianity to introduce an interpretation of insanity as insane as insanity itself. For 1,500 years its despicable doctrine of demon possession ruled Europe, with the result that every madhouse was a monstrous center of brutality.

"The prevailing idea of the pathology of insanity in Europe during the Middle Ages", writes Dr. Frederick Peterson, Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, "was that of demonical possession. The insane were not sick, but possessed of devils, and these devils were only to be exorcised by moral or spiritual agencies . . . Torture and the cruelest forms of punishment were employed. The insane were regarded with abhorrence, and were frequently cast into chains and dungeons."

Prior to the 19th century there were no real hospitals for the treatment of the insane in the whole of Christendom. There were merely places of restraint, crude prisons where victims of mental derangement were shut up under the most horrible conditions. Christianity had but one method to offer for the treatment of madness: prayer and incantation. Celestial magic alone was depended on, and resorted to effect a cure. Exorcism, visits to miracle shrines, and even floggings were employed to cast out the demons that were supposed to possess the insane. Their plight was pitiful. Some, more fortunate than others, were whipped and driven out of town by the public executioners, and left to wander through the countryside like wild beasts. Shunned and abandoned by those who adored Jesus, these outcasts at least fared better than those who remained behind to endure torment at the hands of pious stupidity. So long as Christendom believed that insanity was due to demon possession there was no hope of reform. And as this belief had divine wisdom and Scriptural authority behind it, it was unthinkable to question it. Had not Jesus cast out demons and driven a legion of them into a herd of swine? If the founder of Christianity had so regarded the insane, what could one expect from his equally ignorant followers but strict conformity to his examples and precepts?

The early Christian fathers were gluttons for superstition. Among the big brains of the Church who believed in demonology were Justin Martyr (150 A. D.), Tertullian (220 A. D.), Clement of Alexandria (220A. D.), Origen (254 A. I), Lactantius (325 A. D.), St. Chrysostom (407 A. D.). They believed, not only that demons caused disease but brought on storms and famines. St. Augustine, in a mammoth work on miracles, solemnly relates the following story, cited by Bronson C. Keeler, in his "A Short History of the Bible" :
"A young man possessed of demons was relieved by the prayers and hymns of some women, but in departing the demons struggled fiercely, so that one, in passing out through the young man's eye, knocked that organ from the socket. It fell on his cheek, and hung there by a vein till one of the women returned it to its place, and, by seven days' praying and singing it was entirely healed."

Bedlam, the first lunatic asylum in England, has long symbolized all that was vile and vicious in the treatment of the mentally deranged. "It became," says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "famous and afterwards infamous for the brutal ill-treatment meted out to the insane." Here in what was known as Bethlehem Hospital, Christian ignorance and Christian cruelty inaugurated a reign of horror that was surpassed only by the Spanish Inquisition.

A quarter of a century after the great reformer Piner had unchained lunatics in the asylums of Paris and pleaded for humane treatment of the insane, his pupil, Esquirol, writing of conditions throughout Europe, said:
"These unfortunate people are treated worse than criminals, reduced to a condition worse than that of animals. I have seen them without clothing, covered with rags, and having only straw to protect them against the cold moisture and the hard stones they lie upon, deprived of air, given to mere gaolers and left to their surveillance. I have seen them in their narrow and filthy cells, without light and air, fastened with chains in these dens in which one would not keep wild beasts. This I have seen in France, and the insane are everywhere in Europe treated in the same way."

Nor is belief in demonology entirely discarded by the Christians of our time. To this day, the Roman Catholic Church regards "demon possession", not as a medieval superstition or a survival of savage culture, but as a fact, recurring at times in isolated cases throughout the world. Turn to your Catholic Encyclopaedia (article "Exorcist") and you will find precise instructions given as to the procedure a priest should follow in casting out devils. He is told even how he must dress while exhorting the demons to depart :
"In Christian countries authentic cases of possession sometimes occur, and every priest . . is liable to be called upon to perform his duty as exorcist. Each case is to be carefully examined and great caution to be used in distinguishing genuine possession from certain forms of disease. If expulsion of the evil spirit is not obtained, at once, the rite should be repeated, if need be, several times. The exorcist should be vested in surplice and violet stole."

And how was the reform brought about? By the work of the Materialists, by the efforts of that despised body of men who rejected the existence of spirit and who believed only in the activities of matter.

If religious writers have ever used the word "crass" to decry anything they detest more than they do the doctrine of Materialism, we have yet to hear of it. It is always "crass Materialism" they berate, that feared and wicked doctrine, which, in spite of being constantly assailed and "exploded"' by theologians, returns to plague them with its resplendent record of humane and beneficent accomplishments in every field of endeavor.

And it was this materialism, repudiated and besmeared by every lackey of religion, that stood for the sane treatment of the insane and for the inauguration of an era that was to supplant the driveling idiocies of Christian faith. It.was men like Diderot and Pinel, materialists both, who made war against the monstrous evils of demoniacal belief.

"It is certainly true as a historical fact", writes Viscount Morley in his "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists", vol. 2, p. 175, "that the rational treatment of insane persons, and the rational view of certain kinds of crime, were due to men like Pinel, trained in the materialistic school of the eighteenth century. And it was clearly impossible that the great and humane reforms in this field could have taken place before the decisive decay of theology."

To sum up, it was crass Christianity, with its vulgar notions and gross ignorance concerning insanity, that alone was responsible for the ill treatment of the insane and for the unspeakable barbarities committed against thousands of supposed victims of demon possession. Chained to staples in a wall and left to rave out their misery in fetid dungeons, these victims of Christian brutality found no escape except through their release by death. Christianity, in every sense of the word, was as crazy as those it had in its care. It had forgotten -- if it ever knew -- all that the great Greek Galen had taught the world hundred of years before.

And it was precisely our much-maligned and religiously-scorned "Eighteenth Century Materialism" that recognized insanity as a pathological disturbance of the brain rather than as a possession by devils, and which sought, by medical means, to lessen the suffering of those whose mental affliction had been aggravated by priestly stupidity.

Such, in brief, is the story of Christianity's treatment of the insane, a record of infamy that came to an end only through the triumph of Materialism and by the overthrow of a priesthood that had long usurped the province of science. With the downfall of demonology came the brilliant discoveries of clinical medicine, with the biologist, the bio-chemist and the neuropathologist replacing the Christian quack.