The Loyola University president, Merrifield, who has spoken in tongues for years, says: “Tongues could be a hysterical experience, or, according to some, a diabolical one.”

Todd H. Fast, rector of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, in Huntington Park, California, who has been speaking in tongues since 1969, said: “Tongues is controversial. The devil has many ways of working at us. When we come into the baptism of the Holy Spirit [of which Pentecostals consider speaking in tongues to be a sign] he really attacks.”

That “speaking in tongues” as employed by “Pentecostal” groups today is unscriptural was acknowledged by Nazarene clergyman Timothy Smith, renowned Johns Hopkins historian, at the fifth annual meeting of the Society of Pentecostal Studies, held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in December 1975. He admitted that tongue-speaking is attractive “because of its mystery” and because it “transcends the rational.” He declared, nevertheless, that the modern use of tongues is a “mistaken bypass” based on a misunderstanding of Scripture. Smith maintained that “tongues” in the “New Testament” refers to known dialects, not unknown tongues. He argued that the entire thrust of Scripture is “reasonableness and clarity,” and that unknown glossolalia (speaking in tongues) would defeat understanding. Concluding that there is “no evidence of such religious glossolalia in the New Testament, the early Church, or in history,” Smith called on Pentecostal leaders to “use intellectual honesty responsibly to face this misuse.”​—Christianity Today, January 2, 1976.