Would Mr.Moore have thought that story any more incredible than the other?
Would he have thought it worse than a thousand other things that a modern mystic may lawfully believe?
Would he have risen to his feet and told Mr.Yeats that all was over between them?
Not a bit of it.
He would at least have listened with a serious, nay, a solemn face.
He would think it a grim little grotesque of rustic diablerie, a quaint tale of goblins, neither less nor more improbable than hundreds of psychic fantasies or farces for which there is really a good deal of evidence.

He would be ready to entertain the idea if he found it anywhere except in the New Testament.
As for the more vulgar and universal fashions that have followed after the Celtic movement, they have left such trifles far behind.
And they have been directed not by imaginative artists like Mr.Yeats or even Mr.Moore, but by solid scientific students like Sir William Crookes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I find it easier to imagine an evil spirit agitating the legs of a pig than a good spirit agitating the legs of a table.
But I will not here enter into the argument, since I am only trying to describe the atmosphere.

Whatever has happened in more recent years, what Huxley expected has certainly not happened.
There has been a revolt against Christian morality, and where there has not been a return of Christian mysticism, it has been a return of the mysticism without the Christianity.

Mysticism itself has returned, with all its moons and twilights, its talismans and spells.
Mysticism itself has returned, and brought with it seven devils worse than itself.
But the scientific coincidence is even more strict and close.
It affects not only the general question of miracles, but the particular question of possession.

This is the very last element in the Christian story that would ever have been selected by the enlightened Christian apologist.