DEVIL WORSHIPPERS

Taranaki Daily News, 29 March 1930, Page 30 (Supplement)

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 countrysides to-day there are people who traffic with the devil, and worship evil for its own sake;- that most of the patients in asylums are not mad, but possessed by demons; that he has many times saved the reason, and probably the lives, of men and women so afflicted by exorcising the evil spirit; and, finally, that there is a town in Oxfordshire which at one time was laid under a curse by two men —one of them notorious to-day who wore dabbling in black magic. The delicate social circumstances of the vicar’s work as an exorcist makes it impossible to disclose his name, but 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. “I am not a Spiritualist, and I do not attend spiritualistic - seances. But, as a logical Christian, I believe in the existence of disembodied spirits, some of whom are evil, and powerful enough to influence us.

“While I was a curate in Edinburgh I was called to the bedside of a woman reputed to possess second sight. She had been drinking heavily, and had exhibited symptoms of delirium tremens. ■ ' v “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 be ‘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 bad reputation —I was struck at once with ah 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 —I 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 tyith 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 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 vicars first attempt at exorcism. “I know of a small town in Oxfordshire,” he said, “the people of which became obsessed through the abominations practised by two Oxford students who had gone in for black magic. - “The town, under the malign influence let loose there, visibly degenerated. The people changed, their lives became utterly evil, and even the material surroundings became affected.

“It took a long while to put matters right, but by moans of a special mission wc 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 to-day. who steep themselves in evil as a drunkard soaks himself, in alcohol. I know that at this moment Sataiiism 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.” ° c , 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 be burned. It'was the most horrible furniture I have even seen,” he told me, “carved everywhere with writhing serpents.”