" p. 350.
(_e_) In _Siegel's_ Manual of Christian Ecclesiastical Antiquities, (a
learned and excellent work in four volumes, published in Leipsic, 1836,)
vol II. p. 64, 65, 67, we find the following testimony: "Inasmuch as he
(Luther) pronounced this rite not indeed as necessary, but yet as
_highly useful_, in order to remind the people very impressively of the
power of sin and the devil; it was not remarkable that the zealous
adherents of Luther were also unwilling to abandon his views on this
subject. Hence we find that _in all countries in which the views and
example of Luther were rigidly adhered to, as in Saxony, Wuertemburg,
Hanover, Sweden, and other places_, a strong attachment to exorcism
prevailed, which was often regarded _as the criterion of orthodoxy_."
"Some Lutherans cherished exorcism with a kind of _passionate
fondness_." "In the sixteenth century exorcism was alternately defended
in one place and disapproved in another; and in the latter half of the
eighteenth, attention was again directed to the subject partly by
accidental circumstances, and partly also by the great changes in the
department of theology. The result has been that exorcism has been
entirely abolished in different individual towns; and in several
countries. This, for example, was the case in Regensburg in 1781, in
Hamburg in 1786, and since 1811, in all Sweden.
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