King's Business - 1920-05

442 THE K I N G ' S B U S I NE S S due to hazy translation is more and more evident. Beyond this, may the Lord help us to be cautious, for it was Jesus who said: “ If a man love me,' he will KEEP MY WORDS.” “ The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” —K. L. B. IS DEMON Possession Possible? The papers have recently been reporting the experiments of a French Doctor, M. Mangin, a specialist in psychotherapy, in the case of a woman who for seven years has been suffering from a sort of anti-religious mania. The sight of a church or any sight or sound connected with religion, or any­ thing that suggested Christ or God to her would bring on attacks of violence in which she would tremble violently and sometimes faint. Doctors whom her husband consulted gave up the case, when Mangin began to experiment. He conceived the idea of transfering the woman’s malady, with all its painful manifestations to someone else who was so constituted that they could cast off the malady. He picked out a woman of peculiar temperament, easily susceptible to suggestion, and the young woman consented to the experi­ ment. She was put to sleep with the afflicted woman holding her hand. A short time afterward a remarkable transference took place; a fit of agonizing convulsions seized the young woman, while the patient grasped the doctor’s hand and assured him with much emotion that the mania had left her. The other woman threw herself in a frenzy to the floor, beating her head and crying out as the patient had formerly done. The doctor made soothing sug­ gestions to her until she returned to sleep, and when she awoke, she was in a normal mental condition. The erstwhile patient has since found herself able to attend church without any distressing symptoms. Dr. Mangin admits he does not know what force was responsible for the cure and makes no pretense of interpreting the facts. Is any better demonstration needed of the reality of demon possession? No one can doubt that Jesus Christ taught the reality of demons in men and science does not disprove. Some specialists in insanity have expressed the belief that certain patients in the asylums were possessed by a personality not their own. Jesus Christ distinguished between disease and demon pos­ session and treated them differently. Demon possessed persons usually shrieked in terror of Jesus and when He cast out demons, the persons relieved of them are recorded as acting very similar to the young woman info whose body the evil power was transferred. What became of the demons, we do not know, but the young woman who submitted to the experiment may not have finished her story as yet. —K. L; B.

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