DEVIL WORSHIPPERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 927, 21 March 1930, Page 13

DEVIL WORSHIPPERS

TRAFFIC WITH SATAN IN ENGLAND VICAR’S AMAZING CHARGES I sat in the study of a typical English country vicarage in Hampshire, listening to a typical English country vicar, writes a correspondent in the London "Daily Mail.” And these are some of the things he told me:—That in the country- | sides today there are people who i traffic with the devil, and worship evil | for its own sake; that most of the j patients in asylums are not mad, but | possessed by demons; that he has | many times saved the reason, and j probably the lives, of men and women !so afflicted by exorcising the evil j spirit; and, finally, that there is a I town in Oxfordshire which at one time was laid under a curse by two men—one of them notorious today—who were dabbling in black magic. The delicate social circumstances of the vicar’s work as an exorcist makes it impossible to disclose his name, bat I have his permission to publish “some of his astonishing experiences. “I first began to use the powers of Christian exorcism by chance,” he said. “X am not a Spiritualist, and I do not attend spiritualistic seances. But, as a logical Christian, I believe in the existence of disembodied 1 spirits, some of whom are evil, and i powerful enough to influence us. j “While I was a curate in Edinburgh j I was called to the bedside of a woman I reputed to possess second sight. She | had been drinking heavily, and had ! exhibited symptoms of delirium tremens. “My work among the slums had familiarised me with that terrible consequence of alcoholism, but the symptoms of this woman were different. She did not merely appear to he ‘seeing things.’ She seemed to see things that were really there. “When I entered the house where she had a room—it was a house of had reputation—l was struck at once with an overpowering sense of evil. “It produced in my mind a sensation exactly like physical nausea, and added to that was a horrible kind of tension or pressure—l do not know how to express it exactly. “I had the poor woman removed from the place, and then, the next day, I returned, bringing with me the robes of my office. I then exorcised that house room by room. “Definite proof that I had succeeded was afforded me by the fact that the 1 victim, on returning to her room, became calm, and complained no more of seeing ‘horrible things,’ though, on entering, she had been in a state of fear.” That experience was the vicar’s first attempt at exorcism. “I know of a small town In Oxford shire,” he said, “the people of which became obsessed through the ahonr nations- practised by two Oxford students who had gone in for black ! magic. “The town, under the malign In fluence let loose there, visibly do generated. The people changed, theii lives became utterly eyil, and even the material surroundings became affected. “It took a long while to put matters right, tut by means of a special mission we were able in the end to drive away whatever it was that had blighted the place.” What we call lunacy or brain disease is, according to the vicar, more often a form of demoniac possession or obsession. "There are people today who steep themselves in evil as a drunkard soaks ! himself in alcohol. I knf/w that at this moment Satanism is being practised in Scotland, and that In the New Forest, near here, ancient Pagan abominations are secretly indulged in. I cannot give details, but there is the fact.” One of the most curious of the vicar’s experiences was when he saved the reason of a woman who had lived in China by exorcising her furniture, and then ordering it to he burned. It was the most horrible furniture I have ever seen,” he told me, “carved everywhere with writhing serpents.”