The Dark Sacrament Read Online Free PDF

more easily be explained in terms of psychiatric disturbance.
    Cuneo had succeeded in polarizing the entire debate, leaving the general reader to ponder the question: Whom are we to believe? To many, the answer seems to lie midway between science and superstition. The aforementioned Dr. M. Scott Peck, who died in 2005, was perhaps the most notable among those who chose the middle ground.
    In one of his early books, People of the Lie, the Harvard-educated psychiatrist alludes briefly to two cases from his medical files that forced him to reconsider his position on the preternatural. He recounts a particularly harrowing experience, during which a patient presented undeniable—for Peck at least—evidence of demonic possession. The disturbed young woman seemed to physically change before his very eyes. He recalls her face as wearing an expression “that could be described only as Satanic. It was an incredibly contemptuous grin of utter hostile malevolence.” Later Peck tried to emulate that grin in his bathroom mirror and found it impossible.
    The change did not confine itself to the woman’s face. Her entire body suddenly became serpentine. She writhed on the floor like a huge, vicious snake and actually attempted to bite the members of his team. “The eyes were hooded with lazy reptilian torpor,” he recalls, “except when the reptile darted out in attack, at which moment the eyes would open wide with blazing hatred.”
    In the face of such a monstrous metamorphosis, the psychiatrist was forced to concede the existence of an external entity present in his patient. “I now know that Satan is real,” Dr. Peck concluded in his book. “I have met him.” He confessed also that, of the hundreds of cases he treated in the course of his professional life, a full 5 percent of symptoms presented by patients could not be explained in terms of present-day medical science.
    In the conclusion to his final book, Glimpses of the Devil, Peck summed up his convictions, arrived at in the course of treating a young woman he called Jersey. Her case alone had effected his conversion from skeptical psychiatrist to believer in an entity that was the very personification of evil. His newfound belief went beyond faith; Peck knew with certainty that such an entity existed and furthermore had minor demons under his control. He wrote:
    By the Devil, I mean a spirit that is powerful (it may be many places at the same time and manifest itself in a variety of distinctly paranormal ways), thoroughly malevolent (its only motivation seemed to be the destruction of human beings or the entire human race), deceitful and vain, capable of taking up a kind of residence within the mind, brain, soul, or body of susceptible and willing human beings—a spirit that had various names (among them Lucifer and Satan), that was real and did exist.
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    Reverend William H. Lendrum

PART ONE
    THE CANON: REVEREND WILLIAM H. LENDRUM
    Canon Lendrum is quick to point out that his background, accomplishments, and ministry in the Church are in the category of the ordinary and commonplace. He makes no claim to any special favors or unusual gifts.
    He was born in 1924 in Belfast of a working-class family. He describes his parents as “good people,” who were ambitious for their children but “not overly religious.”
    At school, he applied himself diligently to his work and enjoyed sports. His realization that he must follow a spiritual path came soon after he entered university in 1943.
    â€œI was studying commercial science at Queen’s in Belfast, when I realized that I wanted to become a minister,” he recalls. “It was nothing earth-shattering, or anything like that. I simply understood the path I must follow in life.” He dropped out of the course and transferred to Trinity College Dublin. After six years’ study, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1951.
    Two years later he married