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 discovered the formulas for driving out the evil spirits which cause disease.

In the Persian theology regarding the struggle of the great powers of good and evil this idea was developed to its highest point.
From these and other ancient sources the Jews naturally received this addition to their earlier view: the Mocker of the Garden of Eden became Satan, with legions of evil angels at his command; and the theory of diabolic causes of mental disease took a firm place in our sacred books.
Such cases in the Old Testament as the evil spirit in Saul, which we now see to have been simply melancholy--and, in the New Testament, the various accounts of the casting out of devils, through which is refracted the beautiful and simple story of that power by which Jesus of Nazareth soothed perturbed minds by his presence or quelled outbursts of madness by his words, give examples of this.