Wesley Corpus

You observe, first, 'that all the primitive accounts of casting out devils, though given by different Fathers and in different ages, yet exactly agree with regard to all the main circumstances' (page 91). And this you apprehend to be a mark of imposture. 'It looks,' you say, 'as if they copied from each other'! Now, a vulgar reader would have imagined that any single account of this kind must be rendered much more (not less) credible by parallel accounts of what many had severally seen at different times and in different places. 9. You observe, secondly, 'that the persons thus possessed were called ejggastrivmuqoi, " ventriloquists "' (some of them were), 'because they were generally believed to speak out of the belly. Now, there are at this day,' you say, 'those who by art and practice can speak in the same manner. If we suppose, then, that there were artists of this kind among the ancient Christians, how easily, by a correspondence between the ventriloquist and the exorcist, might they delude the most sensible of their audience!' (Page 92.) But what did the ventriloquist do with his epilepsy in the meantime You must not let it go, because many of the circumstances wherein all these accounts agree cannot be tolerably accounted for without it. And yet how will you make these two agree It is a point worthy your serious consideration. But cheats, doubtless, they were, account for it who can. Yet it is strange none of the heathens should find them out, that the imposture should remain quite undiscovered till fourteen hundred years after the impostors were dead! He must have a very large faith who can believe this--who can suppose that not one of all those impostors should, either through inadvertence or in the midst of tortures and death, have once intimated any such thing. 10. You observe, thirdly, 'that many demoniacs could not be cured by all the power of the exorcists, and that the cures which were pretended to be wrought on any were but temporary, were but the cessation of a particular fit or access of the distemper. This,' you say, 'is evident from the testimony of antiquity itself, and may be clearly collected from the method of treating them in the ancient Church.' (Ibid.)