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but, above all, laid stress on the cure of madness as a disease, and on the absolute necessity of mild treatment. (342) It is significant of this scientific attitude that the Greek word for superstition means, literally, fear of gods or demons. 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.(343) (343) For authorities regarding this development of scientific truth and mercy in antiquity, see especially Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch des Psychiatrie, Stuttgart, 1888, p. 40 and the pages following; Trelat, Recherches Historiques sur la Folie, Paris, 1839; Semelaigne, L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquitie, Paris, 1869; Dagron, Des Alienes, Paris, 1875; also Calmeil, De la Folie, Sprenger, and especially Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, Berlin, 1840. 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