of the wild fowl, and the howling of the wind, were to them the yells
of evil spirits. They dared not pass a graveyard by night for fear
of seeing things of which we will not talk. They fancied that the
forests, the fens, the caves, were full of spiteful and ugly spirits,
who tempted men to danger and to death; and when they prayed to be
delivered from the perils and dangers of the night, they prayed not
only against those real dangers of fire, of robbers, of sudden
sickness, and so forth, against which we all must pray, but against a
thousand horrible creatures which the good God never created, but
which their own fancy had invented.

Now in the Bible, from beginning to end, you will find no teaching of
this kind. That there are angels, and that there are also evil
spirits, the Bible says distinctly; and that they can sometimes
appear to men. But it is most worthy of remark how little the Bible
says about them, not how much; how it keeps them, as it were, in the
background, instead of bringing them forward; while our forefathers
seem continually talking of them, continually bringing them forward--
I had almost said they thought of nothing else. If you compare the
Holy Bible with the works which were most popular among our
forefathers, especially among the lower class, till within the last
200 years, you will see at once what I mean,--how ghosts,
apparitions, demons, witchcraft, are perpetually spoken of in them;
how seldom they are spoken of in the Bible; lest, I suppose, men
should think of them rather than of God, as our forefathers seem to
have been but too much given to do.

And so with this Psalm. It takes for granted that men will have
terrors by night; that they will be at times afraid of what may come
to them in the darkness. But it tells them not to be afraid, for