»I- \ ARMY MEDICAL LIBRARY FOUNDED 1836 WASHINGTON, D.C. THE HISTORY OF THE S UPERNATTJ RAL IN ALL AGES AND NATIONS AND IN ALL CHURCHES CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN DEMONSTRATING A UNIVERSAL FAITH. BY WILLIAM HOWITT. ' Xit ©tifttmxlt ift nid)t wrfd)lefftn, S5ein Sinn ift jit, kin £en ift to&t.' Goethe, Fault. •There ore two courses of Nature—the ordinary and the extraordinary.' BuTLEa's Analogy. 'Thou canst not call that madness of which thou art proved to know nothing.' Tertuujan, Apology I. IN TWO. VOLUMES. VOL. II. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1863. 860 1663 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. CHAPTER I. MAGIC IN ITS RELATION TO THE SUPERNATURAL. Magic in general—Found in the most ancient Nations—Chaldeans, Chi- nese, Indians, Phoenicians — Magic of the Greeks and Romans — Of the Scythians, Germans, Sclaves, Celts, Gauls — Dualism — Magic of the Hebrews — The Cabala—Its elementary Spirits — Magic amongst the Natives of America, Greenland, Kamtschatka, Siberia, Africa, Cali- fornia, Ac. — Query as to who was the original Inventor of it — The two Kinds of Magic, Black and White—Magic as if existed in Egypt — Mode of exorcising — Formulas of Invocation — Black Magic — Forms of Conjuration — Professors of Magic; Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, Agrippa—Learned Authorities on the Art . Page 17 CHAPTER II. THE SUPERNATURAL IN THE GREEK AND OTHER EASTERN CHURCHES. The Historians of the Church for the first six Centuries, all Greek or Syrian — Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius — The Doctrines of the Greek, Syrian, and Roman Churches during that time Identical—Faith in the Supernatural in the Syrian Church shown by their Liturgies — Prayers for Protection against Evil Spirits — The Spiritualism of the ancient Syrian Saints and Fathers — This Faith still retained by the Greek and Russian Churches — Miraculous Greek and Russian Pictures — Notice of one by Miss Bremer in Greece — Exorcism as practised in Palestine, seen by Dr. Thompson—The Prac- (iii) IV CONTENTS. tice called Dousch — Form of Invocation used by Abd el Kader el Mugraby — Universal Prevalence of Magic in the East — Belief that Jins watch over hidden Treasure — Destruction of Aleppo predicted by M. Lustenau, and witnessed by Dr. Wolff— Predicted Death of Ezra de Piccitto — Silence of Church of England Writers on the East on this Subject —Dr. Stanley, Etheridge, Appleyard—Circumstances in the Life of the Russian Patriarch, Nicon — Instances of the Miraculous in the Russian Histories of the Church — Platon and Mouravieff—The Rev. R. W. Blackmore confirmatory of Mouravieff—The holy Icons — Warnings and miraculous Cures.......37 CHAPTER III. SUPERNATURALISM IN THE WALDENSIAN CHURCH. Separated from the Roman Church in the fourth Century — Protested against Romish Corruptions—So called from their Valleys—Waldenses the earliest Protestants — Their Persecutions by the Princes of Savoy — MSS. of their History brought to England by Sir Samuel Morland — Historians of the Waldenses, Morland, Perrin, Brez, Leger, and Arnaud —Peter Waldo, of Lyons, conveys the Faith to France — Con- tinued Persecutions by the Popes and the Savoyard and French Princes — Cromwell's Intervention — Marvellous Events in their Wars against their Oppressors—March of Henri Arnaud—Waldensian Colonies settle in Germany— Annual Allowance to them by William III. of England — Wonderful Deliverances—Opinion of Bernard of Clairvaux of the Waldenses —The-'Nobla Ley con' — Account of them by the Rev. W.S. Gilly . '..........49 CHAPTER IV. THE SUPERNATURAL AMONGST THE SO-CALLED HERETICS AND MYSTICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. The so-called Heretics of all Ages, Manicheans, Pelagians, Montanists, Flagellants, Anabaptists, Ac, all had Faith in the Miraculous —In- stances of Fools predicting — Basilicus — Claus at Weimar —Bodin Angevin's Account of a Priest announcing a distant Battle in his Ser- mon at Perouse —Similar Occurrence to Apollonius atEphesus during a Lecture —Prophetic Woman during the Persecution of a. d 260 — The Shepherdess of Cret —Account by Fernelius of ayoun- NoWe man during Convulsions speaking Greek, though he had never learned it—Mode of accounting for such Phenomena by Mngnetism, Halluci nation, and Illusion — These Reasoners recommended to try Halluci" nation and Hlusion for the teaching of Greek —Cures and Prescience CONTENTS. V resulting from apparently inadequate Causes, as the Curo of Mademoi- selle Perrier, and Aspasia in Ancient Greece — Singular Facts from Cotton Mather and Olaus Magnus—The real operative Principle to be sought deeper — This Principle a Lex Magna of the Universe —It is Universal and Irresistible—Its Appearances in Churches and Heresies —We must choose the Good or Evil of it — The Albigonses and other Sects—The Apostolikers, Beghards, and Beguines — Brethren of the Full Spirit and Brethren of the Free Spirit—Persecuted by the Roman Church — Bulls issued by the Popes against them — Many of them burnt in Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Savoy — Swestronse Conventualae—Luciferists, Adamites, Turlupins, Lollards — The Cru- ciferi, Flagellants, Pusserers, and Dancers — Eckardt's Doctrines and Death—The Friends of God, Suso, Tauler, Rulinan Merswin, Heinrich of Nordlingen, Nicolas of Basle, Berthold of Rohrbach—The Wink- elers — Nicolas predicts the Schism in the Popedom, and Death of Gregory XI. — Nicolas put to Death — Corruption of the Church — Approach of the Reformation........58 CHAPTER V. THE SPIRITUALISM OF LUTHER AND THE EARLY REFORMERS. Rejection of Miracles by Protestantism — A Recent Discovery of a Copy of the Gospel — Popish False Miracles, the cause of the Rejection of the True—Luther admitted Apparitions chiefly in connection with the Devil— His supposed View of one in the guise of Christ — His belief in Guardian Angels, and also in Inspiration — Luther afraid of exor- cising, lest the Papists should say it was by the Devil — His Ideas of Possession and of Exorcism — Expels a Demon from two Women — Madame Luther's Vision before the Death of her Daughter—Luther's Vision of the Rainbow Bridge — He saw the Devil everywhere, in Winds, Storms, Plagues, and noxious Reptiles, &e.—Idiots, the Lame, Blind, and Insane, possessed by Devils — The Devils in Pilate's Pond — The Devil, he thought, tried to kill an Abbot—The Devil at the Wartburg — The Inkstand — The Bag of Nuts — Mrs. Berblibs heard Infernal Noises at the Wartburg — The Devil helping Suicides — The Devil hates God's Word, Prayers, and Ridicule — Bossuet's Remarks on Luther—The Devil's Arguments with Luther on the Mass—Luther, a great Medium, open to good and bad Spirits — Melancthon — An Apparition to warn Grynaeus — Melancthon recalled from the Vergo of Death by Luther's Prayers — So also Myconius — Calvin a Spirit- Medium— Heard the Sounds of a distant Battle — Belief of Beza and Wolfgang Musculus in Possession—The Faith of John Knox in Spir- itual Revelations to himself — Instances given by McCrie and Boys — The same in Grindal and Wishart —Wishart's Spiritual Warning against Cardinal Beatoun—Wishart's Prophecy of Beatoun's Death . 84 1 * VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER VI. THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Progress in Material Science, but none in Psychology — Recognition of Spiritualism in the Homilies, but denied in the Practical Belief of Clergymen — The Prelates of the Anglican Church have from the bo- ginning for the most part held a Faith in Spiritual Matters in opposi- tion to the Prayer-Book — They contend that Miracles have ceased, yet acknowledge them in their Lives—Declarations of Cranmer, Lati- mer, Hooker, Bishop Hall of Norwich — Hooker and Hall avowed Spiritualists — Hall's 'Invisible World'—Providences in his Life — Lilly the Euphuist — Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Beveridge, Butler, Sher- lock— Butler maintains that there are two Orders of Nature, the Ordinary and the Extraordinary — Beveridge and Sherlock Spiritual- ists—Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, and Cudworth, wholly Spiritualists — Proofs from their Works — Proofs of Raphael, Guido, Dannecker, and other Artists being Spiritualists — Lucretius, Tasso, Coleridge, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, their Opinions—Opinions of John Locke, Sir Matthew Hale, a Bishop of Gloucester, De Foe, and Black- stone, all avowed Spiritualists—The Period of Skeptical Writers, Hobbes, Toland, Collins, Wollaston, Bolingbroke, and Hume —Addi- son, Steele, Dr. Johnson, and Dr. Goldsmith, believed in Apparitions— A farther race of Skeptics —Douglas, Farmer, Middleton, Ac. . .104 CHAPTER VII. PRESENT MATERIALIZED CONDITION OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND OF GENERAL OPINION. Middleton's'Free Enquiry into Miraculous Powers'- Farmer on the 'Credibility of Miracles'-Deny all Miracles out of the Bible-Deny that Sp.rits or Demons can do Miracles - Treat the Performances of the Egypuan Magicians and of the Witch of Endor as Illusions- Douglas, B.shop of Salisbury, follows in the same Course-His Rules for testing true Miracles-These Rules shown to equally explode Scriptural Miracles-Their Effect as applied to the Gospels-Douglas Tz?z>e3ciristingnamongst the Fath—*-* from m;ny i f 1 r! Contrary-°r'gen and Athenagoras affirmed the Mir acles of the Pagans -Irenes mentions the raising of the Denf SJT" °f D°Ue,aS °n the Miracles *< ^e Tol If 'D Abbe Pans-His mode of treating them-The Evident ,7 Truth from Montgeron, an Eye-witness ^dences of their . 135 CONTENTS. VU CHAPTER VIII. THE MIRACLES IN THE CHURCHYARD IN PARIS IN 1731 AND SUBSEQUENTLY. Youth and Conversion of Carre1 de Montgeron — Scenes in the Church- yard of St. MSdard—The Abb6 Paris a Jansenist—Miracles at his Tomb —Montgeron writes an Account of them—Presents his Book to Louis XIV.— Thrown into the Bastile for it — Nine Cases of the Miraculous fully described—The Opposition of the Jesuits, and of the Archbishops of Paris and Sens, and others — Proofs of the Reality of the Cases given by Montgeron from Public Documents—Testimonies of eminent Medical Men and distinguished Men of Science and of the Church — Cavillings of Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, on those Cases—His falso and dangerous Reasonings in his 'Criterion'—The Convulsionaires— Proofs of the Reality of the Marvels attending them . . . 151 CHAPTER IX. THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND—Continued. Wonderful Cures by Valentine Greatrakes — Commenced these Cures in Ireland — Came to England at the instance of the Earl of Orrery — Sojourn at Lord Conway's — Came to Court — Abode in Lincoln's Inn Fields—Testimonies of the Royal and other Physicians, and of Bishops and Noblemen to his Miraculous Cures — Cavils of Bishop Douglas against him—His Arguments those now used by Strauss and the Rationalists — Paley's Notions — His Blunder regarding Mesmerism corrected by Archbishop Whateley — Douglas on Methodism made ludicrous by Time — Milman's ' History of the Jews '— Dr. Hook, of Chichester, says he would reject Miracles if sent — The Protestant Church now isolated from all others on the Supernatural — Conse- quently a Fragment and an Abortion —Opposed to the Testimony of all Time — State Churches, what is to become of them? — Symptoms of Reaction — Penrose and Le Bas on present Miracles — Le Bus con- siders Skepticism a Disease — Spiritual Tendency of Dr. Goddard in the Bampton Lectures and of the present Bishop of London — Dr. Maitland's Satire on Faraday and Brewster — High time to protest against Protestantism.........169 vin CONTENTS. CHAPTER X. SPIRITUALISM IN NORTH AMERICA. Works in which the History of Spiritualism in America is contained — Appeared first at Hydesville in 1848—Phenomena in the Fox Family — Knocking in former Times in various places — At Rushton Hall, at Tedworth, Oppenbeim, in Lincolnshire—At the Wesleys' at Epworth —Answering Questions by Knocks — The use of the Alphabet sug- gested by Isaac Post, a Friend—This used under the Emperor Valens —The Spirit-Pendulum known to the Romans, recently used in France by Dr. Eymard, and in London by Mr. Welton — Phenomena at Dr. Phelps's in Connecticut, also at Mr. Grainger's at Rochester — The Phenomena increase in Power and Variety—Vast Extension of Spirit- Circles—American Spiritualists in 1855 amounted to 2,500,000—Con- versions at the rate of 300,000 Annually—Convincement of Judge Edmonds, Professors Hare, Bush, Mapes, and others—Trance-Speakers, Mrs. Hatch, Mrs. Henderson, Miss Hardinge — Speak, on Sundays to many thousand Hearors — Theory of the Phenomena by Dr. Rogers — Professor Mahan a Disciple of Rogers—The Experiments of Dr. Hare and Judge Edmonds—Mediums using Languages unknown to them—Gov- ernor Tallmadge—Opponents at Buffalo, Boston, Harvard College, Ac. —Defence by Dr. Gardner of Boston — Report on Spiritualism by the Rev. Charles Beecher — Avowal of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher — Mr. Coleman's Report on American Spiritualism — Spirit-Painting witnessed by him — Koons's Rooms in Ohio — The Davenport Boys__ Account of these by various Persons of Credit—The Kentucky Jerks —The Shakers Spiritualists—Their Views on Spiritualism—Letter of F. W. Evans—Mormonism a Phase of Spiritualism—Remarks of Mr. Orson Pratt— Spiritual Therapeutics—Madame Saint-Amour in France — Her wonderful Cures at Nantes —Madame Ehrenborg's account of Madame Saint-Amour-Vast growth of Mormonism Supernatural - Typal Mediums from America —Home, Jackson Davis, and Harris - The.r several Characteristics —Some account of them —Condition of the United States prior to Spiritualism —Account of it by W Robson -Hams warned of the coming Civil War-Effects of Spiritualism on tae American Mind . 187 CHAPTER XI. SPIRITUALISM IN ENGLAND. Spintuahsm in England a weaker Reproduction of that in America Its most prominent Phenomena-Perhaps the greatest ExhiWtion "7 Power the Destruction of Dr----'s Table in Kent-The chief p bl CONTENTS. IX Mediums from America, Mrs. Hayden, Mr. Home, Mr. Squire, Dr. Ran- dolph, Dr. Redman, Mr. T. L. Harris — Probable Causes of the Differ- ence of Intensity in the two Countries — Ignorance of the American Facts by English Opponents — Remark of Judge Edmonds on this Circumstance — The English Opponents merely going over the old Ground—Many of their Arguments borrowed from the first Opponents of Christianity—Examples from Julian the Apostate, and from the Writings of Tertnllian and Lactantius — Rapid Progress of Belief in the midst of Opposition — Private Mediums most Satisfactory — The great Cry of the Human Heart after Certainty of a Spirit-World — Apparition to Lord Chedworth—Expression of the Rev. J. H. Tuttle— Shelley's early longing to see a Ghost—Such seen by him in After- life— Instances from Lady Shelley's Memorials and Williams's Diary —Apparition of Shelley seen by Lord Byron—Aspirations after Spiritual Certainty by Bishop Heber and Robert Burns — Condemnation of Skepticism by the Author of the 'Apocatastasis '— The Mission of Spiritualism to destroy Materialism — Spirit-drawings in England by Lady Ellis, Mrs. W. Wilkinson, and Mrs. Watts—Ladies who see Spirits habitually — Mrs. N----, who saw the Apparition of Captain Wheat- croft; Miss A----, who saw that of Squire and Dame Children at Ramhurst, as mentioned in Mr. Dale Owen's 'Footfalls'—The Case of Elizabeth Squirrell—Literature of English Spiritualism—Mrs. Crowe's 'Night-Side of Nature'—The ' Seeress of Prevorst'—Rymer's Lec- tures— Leighton's Edition of Adin Ballou—Newton Crosland's 'New Theory of Apparitions'—Mrs. Crosland's 'Light in the Valley'— Wilkinson's 'Spirit-Drawings' and 'Revivals'—Coleman's 'Spirit- ualism in America'—Fawcett's 'Angel Visits '—'The Confessions of a Truth-Seeker —Jones's 'Natural and Supernatural'—Owen's 'Foot- falls'—Barkas on Spiritualism—'The Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph' —'The British Spiritual Telegraph'—'The Spiritual Magazine'— Nicodemeans, or Seekers to Spiritualism by Candle-light—Involuntary Tributes to Spiritualism by the Bishop of London, the Rev. E. Bick- ersteth, Hallam the Historian, Dean Trench, the Rev. Professor Kings- ley, the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Ac.— Note on Spirit-Photographs . . 234 CHAPTER XII. OPPOSITION TO NEW FACTS. The inevitable Destiny of new Truths to go out as Lambs amongst Wolves—This experienced in the earliest Times, by Socrates, Pythag- oras, Moses, Christ, Ac.—The early Christians suffered from it, and yet Ridiculed new Truths themselves—Lactantius's Ridicule of Antipodes __Such the Fate of Truth also in Huss, Jerome of Prague, the Lollards, Waldenses, Huguenots, in Fox, Wesley, and all Reformers, in Galileo, X CONTENTS. Harvey, and Jenner — Solomon de Caus imprisoned for advocating Steam — Thomas Gray treated as Insane, for advocating Railways; Gall for Phrenology—Many other such Cases in the Course of Medical Discovery — The Treatment of Columbus, Franklin, and Perdonnet — The Steam Ship ridiculed by the French Academy, as Franklin's Lightning Conductor by the Royal Sooiety—Franklin treated Mesmer as an Impostor — Hahnemann and Reichenbach persecuted for the Discovery of Homoeopathy and Odyle — Microscopes and Telescopes originally denounced as Perverters of Sight—The Vaccination Society as Introducer of an impious Tyranny — Winnowing Machines as Un- godly — Mause Headrigg in ' Old Mortality'— Forks and the Route across Panama denounced as equally Impious.....256 CHAPTER XIII. THE PHILADELPHIAN BRETHREN. Dr. Pordage and the Philadelphian Society —The Will-power of Spirits —Conflicts of Pordage with them—Demon Processions—Their offen- sive Effluvia—They painted Scenes indelibly, on Glass and Tiles— These Phenomena confirmed by Phenomena of to-day—Similar Effects in the Case of Mary Jobson — Spirit-writing and Spirit-drawings of this Period—Baron Gulden.stubbe—Jane Leade—Her Description of Christian Magic —The Exercise of it obtained through the New-birth and Faith—The Works of Jane Leade—Antoinette Bourignon—Early Initiation into Religious Spiritualism—Obliged to fly from Flanders through the Malice of her Enemies — Her Residence in Holland and Germany-IIer numerous Works-Her Admirers; Poiret, Swammer- dam, Ac-Her Persecutions-Her Views of Christian Truth—Christina Pon.atowski and Anna Maria Fleischer-Many Prophetic Mediums appeared during the Thirty Years' War-Margaret Frolich-Christina Poniatowski predicts the Death of Wallenstein, with peculiar Circum- stances-Anna Maria Fleischer used to float in the Air-Predicts War, LTe TT, Sreat ReUgi0US Re™luti°ns-These **. laughed * but came all to pass . & «»■» r .........261 CHAPTER XIV. SPIRITUALISM AMONGST THE DISSENTERS. The Dissenters, like the Church, imbibed Skepticism Th„ r of the Phenomena of Spiritualism ta d.^g i Sk^"06 Professor Hare on Comte'8 Philosophy - This he decaresfnTl~f a Positive Philosophy, essentially a Negative one - R"7^1 B t CONTENTS". xi a decided Spiritualist — His'Saint's Everlasting Rest'—Knockinga noticed by him — Sees in Apparitions a proof of the Immortality of the Soul — Quotes Zanchius 'De Potentia Daemonum;' Luvater de Spectris; Alexander ab Alexandro ; Fulgatius; Ludovicus Vives; Olaus Magnus; Cardan ; Manlius; and Melancthon —Various Char- acteristics of Apparitions noticed by Baxter—Clement Writer preceded Hume in denying any Amount of Evidence sufficient to establish the Supernatural—John Bunyan — Many Pilgrim's Progresses — His the best — Bunyan's early Spiritual Conflicts — His Belief in the actual Operations of the Divine Spirit, and of the Devil—His Belief in Divine Judgments — Apparitions in Wales, mentioned by Edward Jones, an Independent Minister—The Sheepfold seen by him—Dr. Doddridge's Vision—Dr. Isaac Watts defends Belief in Apparitions—Thinks them a Proof of an Intermediate State — The Countess of Huntingdon — Her Husband's Vision of his Death — Becomes the great Friend of Whitefield—Sudden Deaths at one of Whitefield's Meetings—Singular Dream, by a Lady of Brighton, concerning the Countess — Spiritual Intimations regarding the Death of her Daughter, Lady Selina Hast- ings — Mr. Berridge and the Sortes Biblicce — The Countess provi- dentially prevented from taking a fatal Journey — Providential Gifts of Money—Similar Experiences of Lady Anne Erskine, the Successor of Lady Huntingdon—The Colleges and Preachers of Lady Hunting- don—Introduces Religion to the Aristocracy—The first to commence the Enquiry into the Abuses of School Charities—William Huntingdon, the Coal-heaver, who lived by Faith—His Book ' The Bank of Faith' —Special Providences in his Case—The Rev. Isaac Taylor on Appari- tions and Demoniac Possession — Dr. Campbell's Defence of Spirit- ualism in the'British Banner'—Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's Faith in Spiritual Intercourse—Case of her Aunt, Lady Watson—Her Reasons for Belief in the Supernatural—Relates the Appearance of the Spirit of Mr. Petty — Sentiments of Theodore Parker .... 273 CHAPTER XV. GEORGE FOX AND THE FRIENDS. Ridicule of Fox for his Doctrine of immediate Inspiration—Dead State of Religion in his time — Richard Baxter's account of this State — A Hundred Years of Political Churchism had destroyed Christianity — Birth, Youth, and Spiritual Trials of George Fox—His strange Inter- views with Parish Clergymen—Driven by these 'empty Casks' to his Bible__Adopts the literal Doctrines of the New Testament, and preaches them — Macaulay's Remarks on Fox—Fox an Idiot to Ma- caulay, and Macaulay an Idiot to Fox—Fox travels—His interviews with the Seekers—Stirring effect of his Preaching—Men of all classes xii CONTENTS. and Creeds flock to him — His Persecutions and Imprisonments — General Persecutions of the Friends — The Oxford Students— Spirit Manifestations through Fox—Heals the Sick and Crippled—Banishes an Evil Spirit—Is healed marvellously himself—Prophetic Visions —Cruelties practised on his Followers—Fox and Cromwell—Fox and Nayler — Opinions of Robert Barclay — His Vision of the Death of Archbishop Sharpe — Spiritual Manifestations to the Wife of Miles Halhead — Female Quakers in the Inquisition — Spiritual Assurances of their Deliverance—Vision of Daniel Baker—George Fox foretells the Repulse of the Turks from Vienna — Advises Friends to try the Spirits — Judgments on the Persecutors — Prophecies of Friends — Of the Destruction of Cromwell's Government — Of the Fire and Plague of London — The Persecutions of Friends in New England — Judg- ments on the Persecutors—Muggleton and Reeves—Fall and Repent- ance of James Nayler — Nayler misrepresented —His beautiful De- scription of the Spiritual Life — Mistaken notion that Quakerism is dying out—Evidences of Spiritualism in all the Writings of Friends, and in the Lives of their Ministers CHAPTER XVI. MADAME GUYON AND F^NELON. Madame Gnyon's Spiritualism that of the Fathers and Saints of the Catholic Church — The Offence of Madame Guyon was that she made hers independent of the Church — The Incidents of her Youth — Resigns her Children to her Relatives — Publishes Spiritual Works — Patronized by Madame Maintenon and then persecuted by her — The Persecutions of Bossuet —Her Imprisonment —Defended by Fe-nglon — His Persecutions on her Account—Father Lacombe — Con- troversybetwixt Bossuet and F6n61on-F6nglon banished to Cambray -H.s Book-condemned by the Pope-FSnelon publishes 'Telemachus' -Venerated by all Europe-His Diocese protected by Marlborough and Prince Eugene-Madame Guyon's Doctrines the Doctrines of ™ 7, ^ 8Cnpti°n °f Spiritual C°^ersation without Words - This the Doctrine of the Early Church, of Michael Molinos, and others .... CHAPTER XVII. THE PROPHETS OF THE CEVENNES. Slight Notices of the Cevennois in English History-English Misr. tations of them-Defended by Bishop Burnet, Dr. WoodT^" Richard Bulkeley.and others _ti.p«/*™. m: J ' . .dward» Sir 297 333 ■*- »-«■»- or,„i^,;v:zc.:r^ in CONTENTS. Xlll French Authorities—Their terrible Persecutions by Louis XIV.—The Attempt to exterminate them—Banishment of their Pastors—Emigra- tion of their Flocks — Montrevel sent with an Army to exterminate them — They rise on their Destroyers — Miracles which attended their Resistance — Victories over the Royal Troops — Carallier, Rowland, and their other Leaders—Marshal Villars sent against them—Imposes on Cavallier, and induces him to lay down his Arms—The Fall of the Camisards—After fates of their Heroes — Continued Persecutions till the French Revolution —Horrors revealed on opening their Prisons— Peyrat's Visit to the Cevennes in 1840—The Descendants of the Cami- sard Heroes—The Athenaeum in favor of Spiritual Views — Peyrat on the Influence of the Hebrew Literature and Inspiration . CHAPTER XVIII. THE TFESLEYS, WHITEFIELD, AND FLETCHER OF MADELEY. Dearth of Religion in the Days of Wesley and Whitefield —Statement of Watson on this Head — All Attempts to break up such Religious Torpor violently opposed — Phenomena at the Parsonage of Wesley's Father —Dissolute State of the Universities—Wesley and Whitefield commence their Reforms—Fierce Persecutions—Characters of Wesley and Whitefield—Connection of Wesley with Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians—Southey's Ideas of Wesley's Faith in the Supernatural- Corrected by Coleridge —Violent Agitations of the Converted — Mr. Watson's Defence of Wesley's Belief—Whitefield's Assertion of direct Divine Inspiration—Expulsion of Students from Oxford for Praying- Fletcher of Madeley records direct Acts of Providence on his Behalf — Mrs. Fletcher's Vision —Mr. Fletcher foretells his own Death — Wonderful Success and Effects of Methodism..... CHAPTER XIX. BOHME, SWEDENBORG, AND IRVING. Sentiments of Michelet and Vinet on the Introduction of New Truths— Bbhme's Youth and Spiritual Revelations — Prediction of his Future Eminence—Is .shown the Inner Nature of things—His chief Works- Persecuted by the Clergyman of his Parish—Banished from his Native Town—His Works read over all Europe—Much esteemed by Charles I., Sir Isaac Newton, Ac —Translation and Advocacy of Bis Works by II. —2 XIV CONTENTS. William Law —Characteristics of Bbhme and some of his Views — Specimens of his Style—Emanuel Swedenborg—Present Influence of his Doctrines — These revolutionizing the Popular Faith — Laying the Foundation of a Practical Psychology—His Scientific Works—These preparatory to his theologic ones—The Spiritual World opened up to bim more extensively than to Epimenides and Hermotimus—His Spiritual Works — His Predictions in Physical Science now being successively realized—Translations of his Works—Lives of him by Dr. Wilkinson and Mr. AVhite—Notices of Swedenborg's Doctrines by Dr. Wilkinson — Repugnance of Science to the Spiritual — Edward Irving—Early History — His great Popularity in London—Accepts the Truth of Inspiration in his Audience — The Unknown Tongues — Prophetic Inspirations—Cures by Prayer—Irving persecuted by his own Church — His Death .... CHAPTER XX. THE MORAVIAN BRETHREN, OR UNITAS FRATRUM. Origin of this Society — Received by Count Zinzendorf at Herrnhut — Their firm Faith in Spiritual Agency and Phenomena — Examples of such Phenomena — Herrnhut described — Its Silence — The Missions of the Moravians—Calumnies by their Enemies—The Burial-place of the Zinzendorf Family and of the Founders of Herrnhut . . .426 CHAPTER XXI. A CHAPTER OF POETS. All Poets Spiritualists in their Writings-Artists the same - Raphael, Michael Angelo, Benvenuto Cellini-Dickens, Miss Bronte, Miss Mulock, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton the same-Dante's ' Divina Com- med.a a Spiritual Poem-The Spiritual Views in his 'Convito,' Monarchic' and ' Vita Nuova'-Boccaccio's Account of the Vision of Dante's Mother-Dante's Vision of Beatrice-Dante's Revelation aplu0nS5na,nt08 °f th° 'Divina Co—edia' to his Son - Boccaccio Lnct- pftI T m SP^*1-—™e ' Decameron ' full „f its Evi- to wl Z^^J c°»-ed by Pietro Petroni on his Death-bed quence-PetTr *?f^*^"*?"?-11* *«*" in «».*> £u t> ""wns *aith ,n the Spiritual Powers of the PV, i. The Poems of Ariosto and Tasso full of Spiritualism J^^ ~{ CONTENTS. XV it in the 'Jerusalem Delivered'—Tasso falsely declared mad —His Converse with Spirits — His Attempt to introduce the Marquis Manso to an Interview with them — Persecution of Tasso by Spirits in his Prison — The Improvvissatori — Spiritualism of Milton — Proofs from 'Paradise Lost'—Proofs of Spiritualism found in Quarles, Herbert, Herrick, Cowper, Keble, Tennyson, Browning, Philip Bailey, Ac.— Proofs from Young and Mrs. Hemans — From Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge — Sir Walter Scott — From Wordsworth's ' Peter Bell,' and other Poems — Anecdote by Wordsworth of Haunted Rooms at Cam- bridge ............436 CHAPTER XXII. MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS. Review of the Spiritualism in History — The great Extent of the De- partment of Apparitions — Many Cases enumerated — Apparition of Captain Wheatcroft—Colonel Swift's Account of the Apparition in the Tower—of Clamps-in-the-wood — The Cambridge Ghost Club — Two Thousand Cases of Apparitions collected by a Clergyman—Cases related by Dr. Kerner in Germany — Cock-lane Ghost — Drummer of Tedworth—Knocking in many Times and Places noticed—At Oppen- heim — By Calmet — By Mr. Sargent in the Rocky Mountains — By Beaumont, in 1724—By Glanville, in 1677—In the Minories,in 1679— Strange Phenomena at a Camp-fire in the Prairies — Experience of Mr. Wolf at Athens, United States—The Hauntings at Willington Mill —This Case recently confirmed by Mr. Procter—Heaton's Account of the Possession of a Boy—A Nun, in 1858, prophesied at Rome—Vision of the Troubles in America, by Joseph Hoag — Second Sight — The ' Secret Commonwealth,' written by Mr. Kirk, Minister of Aberfoil — His Ideas of Spirits, that they are the Ancestors of the People of each particular Country—Tract by Theopilus Insulanus—Vision of Robert Barclay—Insulanus defends the Power of Spiritual Vision—Facts of Second-sight seen by Lord Tarbot—The Preaching Epidemic—Beat- ings Bells—Mysterious Ringing of Bells in many Places referred to— Strange Phenomena at Sydersterne Parsonage—Case of Mary Jobson of Sunderland—Healing by Spiritual Means — Sleeping Preachers — Direct Spirit-writing by Baron Guldenstubbe—Witnessed by various Distinguished Persons—Instances of Spirit-writing in Scripture—The Law of Moses—The Hand at Belteshazzar's Feast—Case mentioned by Dr. Moore, as occurring to a Country Clergyman, to reveal a Murder — The case of the Laird of Redcastle — Wonderful Cure related by two Members of the Society of Friends a few Years ago . . . 451 XVI CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXIII. CONCLUSION. Fresh difficulties for the Scientific — Cases of Toads, Frogs, Ac, living in Blocks of Stone, Coal, Ac, denied as impossible by Captain Buckland and Professor Owen—Numerous recent Cases of such proved by direct Evidence — A Toad found in a Block of Stone sawn asunder for a Plinth of Birmingham Town-Hall — Toad in Marble Chimney-piece at Chillingham — Toad in the Rock at Little Gonerby Brewery, in Oc- tober, 1862—Great Experiment on Toads enclosed in Blocks of Gypsum by M. Seguin — The Winter Sleep of Snakes, Toads, Frogs, Lizards, and Innumerable Insects—Serpents seen by Dr. Shaw in Egypt living in closely corked Bottles—Frogs at Farnsfield—Hair-worms kept dry by Dr. Valentine, and reviving after Three Years — Similar Evidence by Dr. Braid regarding Animals in Torrid Climates—Similar Evidence by Humboldt — Lfzard found alive by Dr. Clarke of Cambridge, in Chalk Rock Forty-five Fathoms deep—The Ignis Fatuus denied by 'Y.' in the 'Times'—Proved to exist by the Naturalists Gosse and Phipson —Also by Beccaria, Humboldt, and others—All these Proofs of Skep- ticism advancing in the Department of Physics—General Concluding Reflections............486 THE HISTORY THE SUPERNATURAL CHAPTER I. MAGIC IN ITS RELATION TO THE SUPERNATURAL. The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats, though unseen, among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower. Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. — Shelley. AS the belief in the supernatural, or spiritualism, has, from the earliest ages, had a constant tendency to degenerate into magic, because human nature has that downward bias, it is very desirable to have a clear notion of what magic is, that we may the more sacredly guard the great gift of spiritual life, which, more or less, is conferred on us, from everything but its own holy uses and objects. For this purpose I here (17) 18 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. take a summary view of magic, that it may also save me the necessity of farther extended reference to it in the course of this history. Magic in General. Magic, in the highest sense of the word, and in its con- struction into an art, is clearly traceable to high Asia, and to its south-eastern regions. The most ancient accounts of it, if we except Egypt, which may almost be said to belong to that quarter of the globe, are altogether from Asia. The books of Moses make us acquainted with several distinct, artistic, and highly perfected kinds of conjuration, and certain positive laws against it. The same is the case with the In- dian Law Book of Menu, who, according to Sir William Jones, lived about 300 years before Christ. We say nothing of the Persians and their Magi. We find the same traces of magic as an art amongst the most ancient Chinese. Amongst the Chaldeans and Babylonians magical astrology and sooth- saying are as old as the history of these people, and the same is the case with the Phoenicians. If we turn from eastern, central, and northern Asia to high Asia, we find Prometheus paying on Caucasus the penalty of endeavoring to make men independent of the gods. Pro- metheus and Sisyphus are, as far as magic power is concerned, the Fausts of the ancient world. It is in the vicinity of the Caucasus, too, that we find the notorious magic family, which comes before us so frequently in Homer and the later writers of Greece and Rome—uEetes, Pasiphea, Circe, and Medea. Homer shows distinctly that magic is not of European, ex- pressly not of Grecian growth. Wachsmuth thinks that the whole family, by a visible cyncretism in the early ages of Greece, were deduced from Helios in order to bring them nearer to the national and mythologic sphere, and thence to introduce their magic mysteries into the Greek literature. Circe herself was a goddess, sister to ..Eetes, both the chil- dren of Helios and of Perseis, the daughter of Oceanos. GREEK UNDER-WORLD. 19 Their magic art is not Greek, but points to Asia; as they, to effect their metamorphoses, were obliged to mix $dppaz<* a.vypa (Odyssey, x. 236 ; Pindar, Pyth. iv. 415), and touch the Grecians with a magic rod. Even the latter and very charac- teristic magic term ^s'xystv does not appear in Circe's first conjuration, and she does not use the magic formulae. In order to defeat her sorcery, human science is not sufficient, but Hermes, a god, is sent to find the ft.v, Moly. Men can- not easily pluck it — Oeoi o£ te rtdvta Svvavtat, ! The gods can do all things; and hence we see the reason for their con- stant invocation in all such magic processes. Let the reader clearly understand this. Notwithstanding this later devel- opment of magic in Greece, this foreign art brought from Asia, which strove to make itself independent of the higher gods of the country, the oldest popular faith of Greece, as Hesiod shows, had its under-world, and its good and bad subterranean gods and demons, and along with it, as in all other nations, an original belief in magic power; but this expanded and perfected itself, through the later influence of the East, into an artistic system. The old national under- world was drawn into the sphere of the new magic ; the machinery and operations of the arts of sorcery were at- tached to it, and men sought through the dark and destruc- tion-pregnant powers of fate, what could not be accomplished by the gods of the country. The best commentary on this is in Horace: Flectere si nequeo Superoa Acheronta movebo. The under-world, before the importation of the new Asiatic doctrines of magic amongst the Greeks, was detested, as every- where else, by both gods and men (Hesiod, Theog. 743; Ho- mer, ii. 4, 157). Terrific monsters haunted it; the hostile races of giants and Titans were banished thither ; there stag- nated the mysterious Stygian flood. Hence in Lucan, vi. 432, ' I lie supernis detestanda Deis noverat:' hence Erechtho, the 20 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. celebrated Thessalian sorceress, 'grata DiisErebi arcanaDitis operi,' &c. Hence, in the later Greek and Roman magic eras, the original powers of the under-world, Pluto, Proserpine, &c, are not the masters and protectors of the new foreign art, but it is Hecate. This power, who in Hesiod had been placed over the elements, in this later mythology is trans- ferred to the under-world with Selene — no doubt, because adjurations, magic arts., and offerings were made by night — Artemis, Persephone, &c, and a whole infernal court and environment of spectres, phantasms, dogs, serpents, &c, being made obedient to the great queen of sorcery. This includes a complete ouflline of the origin of magic in Greece and Rome, and of its main features to the latest period. We may now take a hasty glance at it in other regions. Turn again to the East. The belief in good and bad spirits prevailed universally amongst the Chaldeans, Per- sians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Indians, Carthaginians, Ca- naanites, &c.; and everywhere the idea of magic was asso- ciated with it. Amongst the greater part of the Asiatics and Africans there could be no conflict betwixt their mythology and this art; for their gods were of the class of powers in- voked. As for the Scythians, Germans, Sclaves, Celts, Gauls, &c.,from the meagre knowledge that we have of their my- thologies, the same ideas appeared to prevail as amongst all other people in the same degree of cultivation. Pliny (H. N.) tells us, ' Britannia hodieque attonita Magiam celebrat tantis ceremoniis, ut dedisse Persis videri possit.' Helmont shows us that the Sclaves had their Zerne-Bog, their black, bad god; and the very name reveals a dualism, for Bog is yet in Polish God, and Zerne black. Thus, amid all these people, and still more distinctly amongst the Scandinavians —see the Eddas —the faith in magic was universal. The religion of most of these nations consisted chiefly in a corrupted star and fire worship. The Persians alone ap- pear to have preserved this in any degree of purity. Over the whole East extended the intellectual system, but under EASTERN DUALISM. 21 the most varied forms, and everywhere connected with dual- ism. Wherever the Greeks and Romans planted colonies, their mythology soon received the Oriental inoculation of the dark and hostile powers. Thus the magic of the Romans and Greeks, carried back to those regions, naturally coalesced with the Asiatic ideas and became doubly strong. In Per- sia, Egypt, aud Carthage, this was the case. But it was in the system of Zoroaster that the dual strife assumed the most positive form. Ormuzd and Ahriman stand as the represen- tatives of the two principles in perpetual conflict. In a less distant degree the same is the casein the teachings regarding Osiris, Isis, and Typhon. In the mythologies of both these peoples, prevails the demon system, the good and the bad principle, and each has its subordinate powers. The dualism of the Chaldeans is less known, but Plutarch says that they had two good and two bad gods, and numerous neutral ones. Dualism lies equally at the foundation of the Indian my- thologies. They have whole troops of contending demons or Dews, which do not confine themselves to the theology, but spread through all their poetry, dramas, and tales, as in Sacontala, &c. Sir William Jones, in the Asiatic Researches, (ii. 49), points out the relationship of the language of the Zend-Avesta to that of the Sanscrit; and Ammianus Mar- cellinus tells us that Zoroaster made acquaintance with the Brahmins; and Arrian in the Indian expedition of Alex- ander, and Strabo also, tell us abundance of things about Indian magic, and about the little men three spans high, which proclaim their kinship to our fairies. The Jews brought back from the Babylonian captivity all the ideas of the Persian dualism; and they accused our Sa- viour and the Apostles of performing all their miracles by magic, and the great master of sorcery, the devil. Horst, in his ' Zauber Bibliothek,' in quoting a long list of instances from the Gospel narratives, says, ' It is in vain to attempt to clear away from these Gospel narratives the devil and his demons. Such an exegesis is opposed to the whole faith of oo HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. the world at that time. If we are to make these statements now mean just what we please, why did no single man in the ancient world understand them so ? Are we become wiser 1 Then let us congratulate ourselves on our good fortune : but we cannot, on that account, compel those venerable writers to say what they, in their own time, neither could nor would say' (vol. ii. 31). The Cabala contains a most comprehensive account of the magic of the Jews. Of the Kischuph or higher magic; the Monen, the astrological; and the Nischusch, or prophetic department. 'According to the Cabala, there is, besides the angels, a middle race of beings, which men usually call the element- ary spirits, but known to the Jews under the general name of Schedim (the male being called Ruchin, the female Lilin), and described as the dregs or lowest of the spiritual orders. These spirits of the elements, the head of whom is the better Asmodeus, are divided into four principal classes. The first, which consist of the element of fire, and therefore cannot be seen with the eye, are well disposed to the good. They willingly help and support men. They are white, and un- derstand the Thorah or law, since they stand in connection with the angel-world. They possess many secrets of nature. Solomon made use of them, and addressed himself to their king. The second class, formed out of fire and air, are lower, but yet good and wise, but invisible to human eyes. Both classes inhabit the upper regions. The third class consist of fire, air, and water, and are sometimes apparent to the senses. Their soul, according to Loriah, is of the vegetable nature. The fourth class, besides the former elements, have a component of fine earth^and their soul is of the mineral nature, and can be fully perceived by the senses. All these spirits of the elements eat and drink, propagate, and are sub- ject to dissolution. The greater part of the two last kinds are of wicked disposition, mock and deceive men, and are glad to do them mischief. Therefore they are under the ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 23 authority of the evil Asmodeus, who is on the side of Smaels, the devil. Whence they are called, like the dark satanic spirits, Masikim and M'chablim. There are amongst them some individuals of a more friendly nature, who mean well to men, and employ themselves in all sorts of domestic ser- vices. These two classes divide into different sorts; some live amongst men, others in the waters, a third kind in filthy places, and a fourth in mountains and deserts; each loves that element out of which it had its origin. Some called Jemim are of hideous aspect, and appear bodily in the open day, amongst the mountains. ' The two higher orders of these elementary spirits, who form the transition link betwixt the visible and invisible, stand bodily next to man, and are very dangerous, being endowed with various extraordinary powers, and having great insight into the hidden kingdoms of the lower nature; and, through their connection with the spirit-world, have some knowledge of the future, but chiefly in natural things. Hence men so soon began to worship them, and make offer- ings to them. ' Some of these answer to our Hobthrushes and Brownies, others to the gods of the heathen and the oracles. The higher of these spirits, says the Cabala, though they can pre- dict something of the future, are not much to be depended upon, because they are more connected with the natural than the spiritual world, and see only through such media. The lower of these natures are still less trustworthy ; since, from their lower position, their vision is more obscure, and they often seek to deceive men by lies. These spirits of the ele- ments live in the birds both of the upper and lower air, in beasts, and in the earth and its minerals. Hence the augurs obtained instructions from them through birds of prey, and magicians through stones, metals, and crystals. 'Maimonides says that it was not only allowed the Jews by their traditions, but commanded them to maintain an in- timate connection with their departed friends, not out of 24 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. curiosity or selfish purposes, but for fellowship in and through God. Therefore the Israelite was bound to pray for his brother who was yet in the region of purification ; but only in cases of the highest necessity, and for the good of those left behind, was it permitted to enquire of the dead. They had a feast of blood on such occasions. A hole was dug, blood poured in, and over it a table was set at which they ate, and the Schedim or spirits of a middle nature appeared and answered their questions, even about the future. The Jews had the practice of tattooing certain names or pictures on their hands by which they came into rapport with these spirits, and they used many magic ceremonies for the same purposes. They put to flight fierce beasts by the utterance of the sacred name, and cured many hurts and diseases by means of magic' (Maimonides in Abodah sarah 12, Absch : 11 Abth.) By the Monen, they produced what the Scotch call gla- mour, making imaginary things appear real; but this delu- sion would not bear the test of water. (Trakt. Sanhedrin, fol. 65.) In the Sohar it is taught that, in the hour of death, a higher Ruach or spirit is imparted to men than what they had in life, by which they see what they never saw before; see their departed friends and relations. (Moichi, fol. 218 ; Trumah, fol. 141.) The Jews, however, believed that the soul was not wholly sundered from all connection with the body, but that the Habal de Garmin, the elementary body, or what the Germans call the Nerve-spirit, remained in the grave incorruptible, till the resurrection, when it was re- united to the soul. That this Habal de Garmin had all the form of the body, and was the real resurrection body. That it had a certain consciousness, and passed the time in pleas- ant dreams, unless disturbed by the nearness to some wicked or hostile body. Hence the necessity of burying friends to- gether, and enemies far apart. Hence the desire of those THE SCHEDIM. 25 who love each other to rest together in the earth. (Nakauti, fol. 66.) The soul, in the other world, is held in connection with this elementary body in the grave by the Zelem or shade in which it is wrapped, the vehicle of the Greek philosophers. All souls must pass through a condition of purgation ; when the purer souls passed into the Gan Edin or subterranean paradise, till the general resurrection, and the impure into the place of farther purgation and punishment In the middle, betwixt the outer world and G'hinham or hell, lies the region of the spirits of the elements, or of nature (Se- pher Makial, fol. 12). To these spirits of the elements, or Schedim, no doubt St. Paul alludes where, in our vague translation of the passage, speaking of the spiritual powers against which we have to contend, he names amongst them spiritual wickedness in high places, but which should be rendered the spiritualities or spirits* of wickedness in the upper regions, to. nvsvtia.ti.xa. xrfi rtovjjpiaj iv tots fnoiipaviioij: which the French have more correctly rendered, ' les esprits malins qui sont dans les airs ;' and Luther ' mit den bosen Geistern unter dem Himmel.' As it was in the ancient world both amongst cultivated and uncultivated nations, so it is in the present age. We find the same faith in both classes of spirit-power, in good and bad, and in magic arts everywhere, and even amongst nations who seem to have had, for ages, no intercourse with the Old World — namely, those of America. Locke says, 'We find, everywhere, no other ideas of the powers and , operations of what we term spirits than those which we draw from the idea of our own spirits, as we reflect on the opera- tions of our own souls, and carefully note them. Without doubt, the spirits which animate our bodies possess a very inferior rank; whence the belief in higher and more power- ful, better or worse spiritual natures operating on the earth, is very natural to the human soul.' We find these ideas in Greenland, where, according to the II.—3 26 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. missionaries, Kranz and Egede, the inhabitants pay little regard to the good Pirksama; meaning, in their language, He above there ; because they know that he will do them no harm, but they zealously worship the evil power, Angekok, from whom their priests, medicine men, and conjurors are also named; and all the operations of the magicians are supposed to become effectual from the co-operation of Ange- kok and his inferior spirits. So in Greenland too, that widely diffused dualism exists. We find, again, very much the same class of ideas and practices in Kamstschatka, according to Pallas, Kraschininikow, and others. So, also, amongst the Samojedes and Siberians. Herr von Matjusch- kin, who accompanied Colonel Wrangel on the North pole expedition in 1820, gives us a remarkable account of the incantations of the Schamans in northern Asia. These men enter into a wild dance, in which they throw their heads about in a wonderful manner, every now and then pausing to take some stupefying drink. They finally fall in uncon° Bciousness, followed by convulsions and groans, and wild howls. The Schamans then stare wildly and terribly, and in this state questions are put to them. Matjuschkin says that at Alar Siiiit, a day's journey from Werschojansk, he saw a Schaman who, in this state, answered him questions regarding his far-distant friends, which he afterwards found to be quite true. The Schaman could possibly have known nothing of him or his friends. On awaking, like all the clairvoyants, he knew nothing of what had passed In Loskiel's 'History of the Missions of the Evangelical Brethren amongst the Delaware and Iroquois Indians ' we learn that these, as well as the Illinois tribes and Hurons and other North American natives, not only believed in good and bad spirits, but in the operations on man through mag- ical and therapeutic arts. In another part of these volumes I have given particular relations of such things amongst the Onbbeways from Schoolcraft and Kohl; ofhers Z h Mexicans, Peruvians, Caribs, &c. Such is the faith in magic MAGIC IN ALL NATIONS. 27 and demon-power also, according to Father Antonio Zu- cbelli, and other writers, amongst the Africans of Congo and Loango, who pay particular reverence to a black goat; such also amongst the Mandingo negroes; according to Camp- bell and other missionary travellers, amongst those of South Africa, the Bushmans, the Xamaquas, &c. In Dutch Guiana, says Howe, the natives believe in the existence of a host of subordinate evil spirits, who produce thunder, storms, earth- quakes, and diseases. These they name Yowahoos (prob- ably the origin of Swift's name, Yahoos), and seek, by magic, to win them over, so as to render them innocuous to them. The natives of California hold the same faith. The Koschimer, in the north of California, declared to the mis- sionaries that the highest good God, he who lives, created a great number of subordinate spirits who fell away from him, and are now in hostility to him, and torment us. In a word, the faith is universal; and Home, Lord Kaimes, says truly, in his ' Sketches of the History of Man,' that the faith in mingled good and evil spirits amongst savage and un- cultivated peoples, is one and the same with their faith in magic. A celebrated German poet has equally well expressed this great fact: Ein alter Stamm mit tausend Aesten, Die Wurzeln in der Ewigkeit, Neigt sich von Osten hin nach Westen In mancher Bildung weit und breit. Eein Baum kann bliithenreicher werden, Und keines Frucht kann edler seyn, Doch auch das ' Dunkelste' auf erden — Es reift auf seinem Zweig allein. On this cosmopolitan and ineradical persuasion was grad- ually erected the artistic system of magic, which has not yet lost its hold even on the most cultivated nations. Who was the original discoverer of it ? Adam, Enoch, Seth, Abraham, Solomon, Zoroaster, Hermes, Trismegistus, or some other more remote and mysterious personage, according to Egyp- 28 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. tian or Indian theories ? To all these has the science been attributed ; and Pliny tells us that a certain great magician, Osthanes, brought it from Asia into Greece. But to none of these does it owe its origin ; it lies in the very foundations of the human mind. Given a conviction of the existence of spiritual and mighty powers exerting their influence over men% the attempt to find means of propitiating those powers, and co-operating with them for the restraint and subjection of one section or the other of them, is a certainty. As there are good and evil spiritual powers, so the art of invoking them soon naturally directed itself into the good and the evil; the fiayn'a and the yorjtiia. Cicero derives the name of magic from the Persians. ' Magi augurantur atque divinant. Sapientum et doctorum genus Magorum habebatur in Persis' (De Div. i. 41, 46). So too Apuleius. ' Si quidem Magia id est, quod Plato interpretatur £*wv $tpartiiavt si, quod apud plurimos lego, Persarum lingua Magus est, qui nostra sacerdos; sin verd more vulgari eum isti proprium Magum existimant, qui communione loquendi cum diis immortalibus ad omnia, quae velit, incredibili quodam vi cantaminum pol- leat' (De Magia, 30). Suidas tells us the difference exactly betwixt paytia and yo^ttla. Undoubtedly, the word is of Me- dian, or old Persian origin ; Meh, or Megh, meaning some- thing great, excellent, and revered; and the Magi of the Persians, Medes, Chaldeans, and Indians, being their highest class of religious philosophers. Mog is still the Persian word, and Mogbed, their high priest, as the high priest of the Par- sees at Surat is called Mobed. When magic arrived in Greece, it found a mythology es- sentially built on the elements of nature, and, therefore, essen- tially congenial to it. In Chaldea it had already been com- bined with astrology, or with the powers supposed to preside over the stars. The Greeks had already discovered more of those secret powers of nature, electricity, magnetism, mesmer- ism, clairvoyance through means of particular vapors or manip- ulations, which we suppose the moderns only to have dis- BLACK AND WHITE MAGIC. 29 covered; and thus gave a significance and a strength to their ideas of magic, which carried it to its highest perfection. (See Ennemoser's 'History of Magic.') The Greeks con- veyed it to the Romans. Let any one refer to the passages in Homer and the Greek tragedians, in Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Prqpertius and others, where magic is mentioned, and to their celebrated enchantresses, Medea, Circe, Erechtho, Canidia, &c.; and then they at least see what was the popular opinion of the art, and of those women as commanders and compellers of the gods, as rulers over fate and men. We see in the Bible striking examples of the art as it ex- isted in ancient Egypt; and even after the Christian era, the Neo-Platonists, and, indeed, some classes of Christians, were deeply devoted to it. Christianity, on the whole, from its higher and purer knowledge, must necessarily reject it; yet it.found its way into the church through the practice of ex- orcism, employed in imitation of Christ, to cast out devils. The formulas of the church, as time advanced, became more ' and more ceremonious, and approaching in character, at least, to White Magic, in opposition to Black Magic, or Black Art, in which appeal was made to demons to assist in obtaining hidden treasures, acquiring honors, wealth, and other worldly advantages, or in which the sacred names of Godrand Christ were blasphemously used for the same base ends. In what came to be called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down. The exorcist was in a well-washed aud cleansed room, or under the open sky, having the preceding morning well washed his body all over, to enter a circle, but not before midnight. He must be newly and purely clad in a sort of surplice, having a consecrated band falling in front, hanging from the neck, and written over with sacred characters. He must wear on his head a tall, pointed cap of fine linen, on the front of which is attached a paper label, having written upon it in Hebrew the holy name Tetragrammaton : a name not to be spoken. The ground must be purified from all un- 3* 30 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. cleanness, and well fumigated. He must fumigate the sacred name on his cap, the letters of which must be written with a never-before-used pen, dipped in Jhe blood of a white dove. When the exorcist wishes to release a miserable spirit which haunts some spot on account of its hidden treasure, he is recommended to take one or two other persons, properly purified, into the circle with him ; so that, whilst he exor- cises the spirit, the others may make two different kinds of smoke, one to allure the spirit, and the other to drive it, or any evil spirits, away when necessary. They are to carry each a piece of chalk, and on the four outsides of the circle draw as many pentacles. One of the associates must hold in one hand a glass of holy water, in the other a cup containing the mixed blood of a black lamb, not a year old, and of a white pigeon, not two months old. The exorcist must hold in his right hand a crucifix, and four wax-lights must be lit within the circle; the staff Caroli standing in the centre. They must then sprinkle the mingled blood and water all round the circle, and, kneeling down, each must cross him- self on the forehead, the mouth, and the heart, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The exor- cist then makes a prayer for the success of their attempt. Scarcely shall this be done when the wicked spirits will begin to torment the unhappy soul which they seek to release ; and the adjuration must recommence, saying, 'All good spirits, praise the Lord with us.' At this the poor soiil will sigh and complain, and say, 'With me too.' The incense is at the same time to be waved, and the associates to repeat, 'Amen !' to all the prayers of the exorcist, which are made in succession. The poor soul reaches the outside of the circle, but its gaolers hold it fast; and when the exorcist bids it depart to its eternal rest, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the devils set up a horrible raven- cry, croak like frogs, and fly like ravens around the exor- cists' heads, but they must trust in God's name and presence The devils will try all kinds of illusions to put them off their FORM OF EXORCISM. 31 guard, but they must not be alarmed. They must have three bits of bread, and three bits of paper, on which the name of Jesus is written, and the instant the demons are compelled to dejiver into the circle the treasure, the exorcist must lay a piece of bread and the inscribed paper upon it, that it may not be whisked away again, or changed for something else, as will be the case if this be not promptly done. Then the exorcist must abjure the evil spirits and princes of hell, Acheront, Ashteroth, Magoth, Asmodi, Beelzebub, Belial, Armagmon, Paymon, Eggson, with their subordinates and aiders, and all present spirits, keepers, and damned souls, in the all-sacred mighty name Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, Saday, and Sabaioth, which is and was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who appeared face to face with Moses orf Mount Sinai, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim—to de- part, and that in the strength of Tu Hagiu, Hagiotatn, which the holy angels adore in heaven with singing and cries of ' Holy ! holy 1 holy ! Lord God of Sabaioth !' And as the rebellious spirits left their seats in heaven, never to return, so shall these evil ones evacuate the earth in the name of Jesus, Amen! Then the damned souls will fling in the face of the exor- cist that he is a sinner, and in no condition to force the treasure from them, and will mock and insult him ; but he shall answer that all his sins are washed out in the blood of Christ, and he shall bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies; and, though they shall still resist, the exorcist shall utter fresh prayers and bannings in all the holy names, cross himself and his companions, who shall, during the same, make fresh consecrated smoke, and he shall point to the pentacles and extacles described on paper with various sacred characters, and shall add the last adjuration in the sacred names:—Hel, Heloym, Sotter, Emmanuel, Sabaioth, Agla, Tetragrammaton, Agyros, Otheos, Ischyros, Athanatos, Je- hovah, Va, Adonay, Saday, Homousion, Messias, Eschere- 32 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. heye, Uncreated Father, Uncreated Son, Uncreated Holy Ghost, Christ conquers, Christ rules, Christ triumphs. Still fresh adjurations and prayers are necessary before the cursed spirits will relinquish the poor soul and depart; but the exorcist adds fresh and more terrible adjurations, and banishes them, as cursed hell-hounds, into dark woods and foetid pools, and into the raging floods of hell, by the name of Christ and all the Evangelists. He holds up the cross before them, and fresh and stronger fumigations are made till they are compelled to depart, and the poor tormented soul is comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels, and the rescued treasure, of course, is secured for the church; and then all is concluded by hymns of praise and the singing of Psalm xci. Certain days are laid down in the calendar of the church as most favorable for the practice of exorcism ; and, if the devils are difficult to drive, a fume of sulphur, assafoetida, bear's gall, and rue is recommended, which, it was presumed, would outstench even devils. Black Magic. As its name imports, Black Magic, or the Black Art, was a machinery constructed for compelling the devils, by the power of the divine names, to submit to the magician and do his will for all or any of his earthly purposes ; to bring him money, render him successful in love or war, or in any other ambition. It is a most blasphemous art, presuming to use the most holy names for the most unholy purposes That the divine names ever did convey any such power, it is ab- surd to suppose ; but it is certain that the devils, under ap- pearance of compulsion, are only too ready to answer such summonses, and that infernal magic is a real power, and has tione strange things. The magician and his companions, if he took any entered a circle nine feet wide, inscribed round with the names and BLACK MAGIC. 33 intervening crosses — Elohim -f Adonay + El Zebaoth + Agla + Jehovah -f Alpha + Omega -+- On. On means the word Oum, said in the Talmud to be the omnipotent word, by the pronunciation of which God created the world. The magician, clad as the exorcist, in pointed cap and long robe, with magic signs on the cap, and a scapulary thrown over the robe, bearing also magic characters, holds a rod of peeled hazel, on which are written in the blood of a white pigeon, Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judeorum. The conjuration must not take place before midnight; and if in a house, the doors or windows must stand open, with no more persons in the house than are engaged in the business. It is most se- curely performed in the open air, in solitary woods, fields, or meadows. The smoke used must be from poppy, hem- lock, coriander, parsley, and crocus seeds. The conjuration must take place on a Wednesday or Friday, and in a house sacred to Mercury or Venus. The magician takes with him the signs and seals of the spirits he wishes to command, for the seals and signs of all of them are drawn. These he lays close to the fire which he makes in the circle, and strikes them with his hazel rod ; and, if they do not appear, he begins to burn them, on which they become obedient. As he and his assistants enter the circle, they say: — Harira, Karis, Astecas, Enet, Miram, Baal, Alisa, Namuta, Arista, Kappi, Megrarat, Sogisia, Suratbala. Then the signs of the spirits called upon are exhibited, and their names pronounced. But not the names of the summoned spirits alone, but all sacred names are in- voked. Here is a conjuration of the spirit-prince Aziel — ' I conjure thee, Aziel, by these words of power—Mongrad, Gratiel, Lalelai, Emmanuel, Magod, Vagod, Saboles, Sadai, Ai, Sadoch, Oseoth, Mayne, Lalli, that thou bringest me as much money as I desire, in good coin and unchangeable gold ; and I command thee to do this in the power of Te- tragrammaton, Agla, Ephbiliaon, Sia, Osion, Zellianole, Elion, and descend to me; appear to me in friendly guise before 34 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. my circle, and bring what I demand from thee, Aziel, in the name of Jesus. Amen 1' When the conjuration has succeeded, praises are sung to God, equally impious. The most frightful curses were heaped on the head of Lucifer, the prince of the devils, if he did not compel Aziel to appear in the shape of a boy twelve years old, and do all that was required of him, bringing a specific sum, 299,000 ducats, in payable coin but unchangeable gold. If the last condition was not imposed, the gold would the next morning, be found dissolved into withered leaves or even horse-dung. The magician, bearding the devil, said that he set his foot on the threshold of hell, and would com- pel him by the name of Christ and the seal of Solomon to* obey, or would heap upon him the most unimaginable pangs and torments to which the hottest hell should seem mild. This specimen of the infernal art may suffice. Whole volumes, almost libraries, exist of it in all the ancient lan- guages, but especially in Arabic and Latin, as well as in all the modern languages. Amongst the most celebrated pro- fessors of the art, many of whom have left treatises of it, more or less white or black, are Herpentil, Cormeyther' Psellus, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Tritthemius, Car- dan, Pomponazzi, Ciesalpinus, Campanella, Gaffarelli, Pigna- telh, Robert Fludd, Casper Pucer, John Dee, iEgidius Gut- mann, Heinrich Runath, Jacob Horst, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agnppa of Rhettersheim, Dr. Faustus, &c, &c. In the various departments of magic, astrology was deeply interwoven; great power was attributed to amulets, seals, astral and other diagrams ; magic roots, or the spring-root, or mandrake, out of which little images were made, and were pretended to have grown so naturally, which were called Alrunes or Alrouns. In ancient times, the herb moly, snakes, hysenas&c played a great part; and in later times, the heart, of moles and of black dogs were supposed to possess great magic virtues. In the witch times, a white otter played a great part. This white otter could, however, only be ob BARBAROUS INVOCATIONS. 35 tained by pronouncing thirteen words: — Studi, Hadi, Ha- nadmae, Comdardne, Kuker, Lice, Unhollzae, Erns, Lucan, Curide, Sagina, Sagine, Kati, Ecknealy, Trinery, which the devil said he had rather be in the hottest hell than hear. The words, indeed, are almost as barbarous as those which Suidas tells us the Milesian women and children sang to their goddess to get rid of the plague : — Bedu, Zaps, Chthon, Plectron, Sphinks, Knaxzbi, Clithiiptas, Phlegmos, Dro-o-ops 1 Having obtained the white otter, you can go about invisi- bly on foot or horseback, pass through closed doors; you shall have all the world in your power; magistrates and judges shall decide in your favor; and you have only to desire wealth, honor, or anything else, to have it. The Hypericum, or St. John's wort, possessed wonderful powers, like the ancient Aglaophtis, whatever that might be, and the Osyris herb mentioned by Pliny, ^Elian, and others. With the wonderful story of the beautiful gardens raised by magic by Albertus Magnus, for the entertainment of William Earl of Holland at Cologne, with wonderful fruits and tropical flowers, scenery, and climate in the midst of winter, the reader is familiar. Such were the notions of magic power in that age! The professors of the occult sciences, as Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, Agrippa, &c, not only believed in astral in- fluences operating on the earth, but they had a perception of secret potencies in physical nature, which have since been proved realities by the discoveries of electricity, magnetism, the odylic force, mesmerism, &c. The astrologists and alche- mists were foster-fathers of the more actual sciences, astron- omy and chemistry. In both of these, as in the moon's influence on the tides, in the recent discoveries in the prop- erties of the solar rays, and the varied developments of chemistry, they were already in contact with facts which they had not the instruments and the modern science to bring forth to the light of demonstration. I have thus sketched at once an outline of magic, the 36 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. shadow haunting the course of spiritualism, that I may have no farther occasion to dwell upon it, except it may be in a mere passing reference. Those who would inform themselves farther of Jewish magic, may consult the Talmud and the Cabala, with the book Shemhamphorash founded on the latter, printed in 1686 by Andreas Luppius of Wesel; the Shemhamphorash being not the sacred name, but the descrip- tion and meaning of it. (See Rosenroth's ' Kabbalah,' and the Introduction to Budeus's ' History of the Hebrew Phil- osophy ;' Paxtorf »s Biblioth. Ratlin, p. 48; or Hottinger's Biblioth. Orient, i. 33.) In contemplating even the less offensive magic, even that so much used by the Catholic Church in the middle ages in cases of exorcism, we are struck with the awful fall from the simple of sublimity of the theurgy of the Gospel times, when Christ and his apostles ' commanded the unclean spirits and they came out of their victims. In its best shape magic is a revolting invasion of the sacred power of the supernatural in the church; in its darkest form it is concretely devilish. Yet there have not been wanting journals which have been repeatedly inviting spiritualists to this prostitution of a divine power, to predict the winner of the Derby, or to enable sor- did speculators to make profitable transactions on the stock exchange. THE FIRST CHURCH HISTORIANS. 37 CHAPTER II. THE SUPERNATURAL IN THE GREEK AND OTHER EASTERN CHURCHES. Perhaps, with the exception of Protestantism, there is not a faith recorded in the world's history, which has leant not upon supernatural revelations, and these the most bright and fre- quent in proportion as we approach the primitive ages. Dr. J. J. Gbath Wilkinson. There is a great difference betwixt philosophy and other arts; and a greater yet betwixt that philosophy itself which is of divine contemplation, and that which has a regard to things here below. Divine philosophy is much higher and braver ; it seeks a larger scope, and being unsatisfied with what it sees, it aspires to the knowledge of something greater and fairer, and which nature has placed out of our view. The one only teaches us what is done upon the earth; the other reveals to us that which is actually done in heaven. Seneca's Morals. IT is scarcely necessary to produce evidence of the spiritu- alism of the Greek Church; for it was for six centuries identical with the Roman Church, and on separating, did so politically and not polemically. The tenets of the Greek Church continued, and still continue, the same in all essen- tials except with regard to the procedure of the Holy Ghost, and in rejecting purgatory—without, however, expressly rejecting the intermediate state. All the historians of the first six centuries are the historians of the Church at large, up to that time including both Rome, Greece, and Syria; all were Syrians or Greeks. Eusebius was the Bishop of Caesarea in Syria. Socrates was a native of Constantinople ; he was educated at Constanstinople ; commenced his career there as a special pleader; and, on retiring from practice, employed II.—4 38 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. himself in writing his history. Sozomen was a Syrian, born in Palestine; educated at Berytus, the modern Beyrout; and afterwards removed to Constantinople. Theodoret was a Syrian; was educated under the celebrated Chrysostom, Pa- triarch of Constantinople; and himself lived most of his life at Antioch. Evagrius also was a Syrian of Antioch. Thus, for the first six centuries the doctrine and practice of the Roman, Greek, and Syrian Churches were identical. Their historians were, as I have observed, Syrian or Greek, and all are redolent of miracle. Without encumbering ray page with voluminous examples of the continuance of this faith both in the Greek and Syrian Churches, I may refer to the works of recent travellers, where the same belief and practice are shown to remain. In the Syrian Churches, whether Nestorian, Maronite, or Jacobite (the latter pro- fessing to be the church of the primitive Jews at the time of our Saviour), we find the liturgies full of the expressions of the presence and action of spiritual beings, both good and bad. In the Jacobite liturgy we find the deacon saying, • The gates of heaven are opened, and the Holy Spirit de- scends upon these mysteries to overspread them. We stand in the dreadful place, with cherubim and seraphim surrounded 1 Brethren and companions are we made in the watches and services of angels and spirits, who are flames of fire' (Eth- eridge's ' Syrian Churches,' p. 202). Like the Roman Church, this Church prays to the 'Holy Virgin,' the 'Mother of God,' and for her intercessions. Un- like the Protestant Churches, it and the other Syrian Churches preserve distinct in their gospel, the sheul and the gihana, the scheol and gehenna of the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, the hades, or intermediate state and hell. In the passage in the Gospels where our Saviour comes walking on the water, Mr. Etheridge has truly translated the word ♦o^M/ta, a spectre, and not a spirit, as our translators have done; the term showing that the Jews at that time perfectly understood the theory of ghosts. THE SYRIAN CHURCH. 39 The priest prays for ' Those who by evil spirits are perse- cuted and troubled.' 'To be defended from every attack 'and violence of demons' (Ibid. p. 208). He prays for the 'exorcists' and others who have fallen asleep. The Nesto- rian liturgy represents the people as drawing near, ' with thousands of cherubims and myriads of seraphims to sanctify, adore, confess, and glorify the Lord of all' (Ibid. p. 222). He calls on the people to join their voices to those of sera- phim and archangels; and glorifies God because, through His mercies, 'the earth-born have communion with the spiritual' (p. 227). He prays to be delivered from the evil one and his hosts; and gives thanks that ' mortal men, weak by na- ture, are enabled to sanctify His name with.the heavenly hosts.' The Maronite liturgy approximates still more to the Roman Catholic, as does their system in the multitude of monasteries. (See Jowett's 'Christian Researches.') This is, as it might be expected in churches founded by Thomas the Apostle ; Thaddeus, who ' performed signs and wonders amongst them;' St. Peter, Chrysostom, Jerome, Leo, Innocent, and other founders and builders of the church at Antioch; Nestorius, Ignatius, Serapion, Babylas the Martyr, and Jacob Zanzala, the consolidator of the Jacobite Church. It is what might be expected of churches which had Eusebius, Sozomen, and Theodoret for historians; which had Ephrem of Edessa, the famous Solitary, Joseph the Seer, of Nisibis, in the sixth century; Gregory Bar-He- braeus, the chronicler of saints and patriarchs, in the thir- teenth century, and from which proceeded Simeon the Stylite, and Cosma his biographer. The same causes render our dwelling on the spiritualism of the Greek Church unnecessary. It preserves all its faith in miracles derived from its common origin with the Roman Church. The works of travellers show this amply, and the 'Travels in Greece' of Miss Bremer, just published, record her attendance at a Greek Church festival, where a miracu- lous picture, found by miraculous means, was exhibiting. 40 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. This was in the island of Tenos. The church had been built in 1821, in consequence of the dream of a drunken school- master, who declared that the Pan-Hagia, or Holy Virgin, had appeared to him in a dream, and revealed to him that, if they would dig into the foundations of the ancient temple of Poseidon, they would find a picture of her. Nobody took any notice of the man or his dream till a contagious disease broke out in 1821, when they began in earnest to delve for this promised picture. They soon came to a half- ruinous vault of a Christian church, and, on removing the rubbish, discovered a small picture of the Annunciation of the Virgin. The picture was carried in solemn procession through the island ; and it is asserted that the pestilence was forthwith stayed. It is farther affirmed that the discovery of the picture took place on the very day that the Greek in- dependence was achieved, thus elevating the banner of th- Cross over the Crescent. A church was, therefore, raised on the spot where the picture was found ; and the anniversary was instituted for the Christians of both the Eastern and Western Churches to meet there, and every year celebrate the event. Miss Bremer saw the priests touching the eyes of a young nobleman with the picture, which, she said, was evidently an ancient one. The young man was quite blind, and had come very far in hopes of restoration of his sight by^ the operation, but that it did not take effect. Numbers of other perSonS afflicted with divers complaints were crowding sertd'w J° "^ ^^ fr°m thG ^ and the People asserted that many cures were done through its means She met, however, with a priest who expressed d sbd ef n an nnracles, and in such hands no miracles were v y Hkely o be performed. Still, the mode of the picture' discotry powers h m ItS aDClent doctrine of miraculous fJt^£*£ If A™ Nonary in Palest 7 years, says> 'Exorcism of demons and p me and evil MAGIC IN PALESTINE. 41 spirits is still practised, and with many superstitious rites and magical powers ; but this is so common in all the ancient churches that it needs no illustration.' . . . ' There are many who pretend to discover thieves and stolen goods by incantations and other means.' We have seen how Mr. Salt of Cairo recovered his plate. He says what the means are by which serpent-charmers act with impunity, and by which persons handle live scorpions, and even put them into their bosoms without fear or injury, are yet a secret. He adds that he has often seen small boys even put scorpions into their bosoms, notwithstanding that they are the most malig- nant and irascible of all reptiles. He notices the riding of dervishes over boys laid side by side flat on the ground, without their receiving any material injury ; and the practice is called Dousch, and is accompanied by a multitude of magi- cal ceremonies. He quotes the account of seeing into the ink in boys' hands in Egypt as given by Lane ; says he has met with English and other gentlemen who witnessed things equally astonishing through the same celebrated magician, Abd el Kader el Mugraby, and he gives us Mugraby's for- mula of invocation: Turshoon, Turyooshoon, come down, Come down; be present. Whither are gone The prince and his troops ? Where are el Ahhmar, The prince and his troops? Be present, Ye servants of these names. And this is the removal; and we have removed from thee the veil, and thy sight to- day is piercing: correct, correct. Dr. Thompson asked a magician in Sidon whether Tur- shoon and Turyooshoon were known to him and employed by him ; and he said they were ; and Dr. Thompson adds : — 'In short, this whole subject is involved in no small mys- tery. It exercises a prodigious influence on Oriental society, and always has done, and merits a thorough examination. The boys evidently see just such scenes as are depicted in the wildest stories in the " Thousand Nights ;" and I expect that this very art was in greater perfection then than now, 4* 42 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. and that the gorgeous creations of that work were, in many cases, mere verbal pictures taken from the mirror of ink' ('The Land and the Book,' p. 157-159). Dr. Thompson also says that the people of the East be- lieve that spirits or jins watch over treasures hidden in the earth. Numbers of people are continually employed in seeking hidden treasures, and many spend their last farthing in the search. They have a notion that people of the West- ern nations have a knowledge of the signs by which these treasures are discovered, and the spells by which the spirits who guard them are overcome; and they, therefore, follow Englishmen who visit the remains of old cities and buildings, believing that they are seeking hidden treasures, and no arguments can convince them to the contrary. They will frequently offer to go partners with them in the pursuit. I will here give a remarkable instance of prophecy taking place, not precisely in the Greek Church, but in the region of its prevalence. Dr. Wolff mentions in his travels that being at Aleppo in 1822, at the house of John Barker, Esq., British Consul-general of Aleppo and Antioch, he was en- quiring after Lady Esther Stanhope. ' She is crazy undoubt- edly,' said Mr. Barker; and he told him, in proof of it, that she kept in her house a French gentleman of the name of Lustenau, who had formerly been a general of Tippoo Sahib in India, and who was deemed a prophet. He had declared to Lady Esther the precise day and hour of Napoleon's escape from Elba. Mr. Barker then, in the presence of M. Lesseps, M. Derche, his interpreter, and M. Maseyk, the Dutch Consul, read a letter of Lady Esther's, dated April, 1821, begging him not to go to Aleppo or Antioch ; as m! Lustenau declared that both those places would be destroyed by an earthquake in about a year. The time had nearly ar- rived ; and M. Derche said that she had recently warned him not to go to Aleppo, for that it would be destroyed by an earthquake in less than a fortnight. These gentlemen made themselves very merry over the DESTRUCTION OF ALEPPO. 43 prophecy at dinner. A few days afterwards Wolff quitted Aleppo in the afternoon, and encamped that evening on the road to Latakia in the desert, near the village of Juseea. As the people of Juseea were talking with Wolff and the people of his little camp, they felt the first motions of an earthquake. In another instant the village of Juseea dis- appeared, being swallowed up by the gaping earth, and the thunder as of cannon came from a distance. Shock after shock succeeded, and presently came troops of wild Arabs and Bedouins, flying over the plains on their terrified horses, and with the hoods of their burnouses drawn down, crying, as they fled past one after another, ' This is of God ! this is of God !' For, says Dr. Wolff, the people of the East always come to the primal cause in everything — to God Himself. They do not, as Europeans do, invariably dwell upon the second causes, but refer everything at once to the Governor of the world. Wolff immediately sent an express messenger to Aleppo to Mr. Barker. He found the whole of Aleppo, Antioch, Latakia, Hums, and Haina had been destroyed by the earth- quake, with all the villages for twenty miles round, and that 60,000 people had been plunged at once into an awful eternity ! Mr. Barker himself had escaped marvellously by creeping, with his wife and child of six years old, from beneath the ruins of their house ! Amongst those who perished in the ruins of Aleppo was Ezra de Piccitto, a Spanish Jew, the Austrian Consul- general of Syria. He was a man detested for his tyrannies by tne inhabitants of all nations. A hundred days before the earthquake he had sent an Austrian subject out of the town in irons. A Turk who had heard of it coolly asked M. Maseyk to count a hundred upon the beads which he held; for, said he, ' on the hundredth day from this act of his tyranny Ezra de Piccitto will die.' This, in fact, was the hundredth day; and, as M. Maseyk had counted the 44 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. ninety-ninth bead, the earthquake came, and Piccitto was killed. This M. Maseyk told Dr. Wolff himself. Very little can be found in Church of England writers on the Eastern Churches regarding their belief in the miracu- lous. They pass it over, as they do not themselves believe in it, as matter that no one cares to know of. Without this, however, no work on these churches is really of much value ; and, therefore, the volumes of Etheridge, Appleyard, &c, are of little use in endeavoring to arrive at a sound view of the Greek, Syrian, and Russian Churches. In Dr. Stanley's 'Lectures on the Eastern Church,' you find a few slight allusions to the subject; but it is to native writers that we must go for real information. In the native historians we have already found abundant matter on this head. We may now glean the few light ears of fact which Stanley affords us. He assures us, however (and this includes all the rest), that ' the theology of the East has undergone no systematiz- ing process. Its doctrines remain in the same rigid yet un- defined state as that in which they were left by Constantine and Justinian' (p. 35). They are, in fact, the same as we have seen them in Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Evag- rius. 'A general expectation,' he says, 'prevails, that, by some unknown process, the souls of the simple will be puri- fied before they pass into the Divine presence ; but this has never been consolidated into a doctrine of purgatory.' No: the belief of the middle state, as we see in the Syrian gospel, has been left as it existed there and amongst the Jews. Hades has not been converted into Gehenna* nor metamor- phosed into a paying purgatory. At p. 46, Dr. Stanley passingly says, ' Remember that Athos can boast its mirac- ulous pictures and springs, no less than Rimini or Assissi.' Speaking of the Moslem faith, he says, ' The sanctity of the dead man is attested by the same means as in the Eastern Churches generally, the supposed incorruptibility of the corpse. The intercession of a well-known saint is invested with peculiar potency' (p. 278). DR. STANLEY ON THE GREEK CHURCH. 45 'The frantic excitement of the old Oriental religions,' says Stanley, 'still lingers in their modern representatives. The mad gambols of the Greek and Syrian pilgrims have been sufficiently told.' That is, there are more life and active faith in these religions than in modern Protestantism. They, he tells you, assert that St. Andrew first planted the cross on the hills of Kieff, and foretold that a great city and many churches should arise there. Dr. Stanley quotes Sir Jerome Horsey, who wrote in 1570. ' I saw this impostor or magician, Nicolas of Rokoff, a foul creature; went naked both in winter and summer. He endured both extreme heat and frost; did many things through the magical illusions of the devil; much followed, praised, and renowned both by prince and people. He did much good,' &c. (p. 333). Speaking of the siege of the Troitza Monastery near Mos- cow, in 1613, he says,' Rude pictures still represent, in strange confusion, the mixture of artillery and apparitions, fighting monks and fighting ghosts, which drove back the Polish assailants from the walls of the beleaguered fortress' (p. 342). In the story of the Russian Patriarch, Nicon, in 1667 (chiefly drawn from Mouravieff), in his banishment to the monastery of Therapontoff, on the shores of the White Lake, when shut up at night in an empty house in the depth of a Russian winter, an old woman came up through a trap-door, and assured him that she had been shown his coming in a dream, and ordered to provide all things necessary for his comfort. By such repeated interpositions his fearful journey was made tolerably easy. When he was about to die, one of his worst enemies, the Archimandrite Sergius, was warned of it in a dream, and led to meet him, and implore his for- giveness (p. 377). Peter the Great, in his reforming career, declared that he would have no false miracles ascribed to holy pictures (p. 407). These slight passages show that Dr. Stanley could have told us more than he has done both of the faith of the Rus- sian and Eastern Churches in the miraculons, and of the 46 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. abuses of this faith which priestcraft has introduced into the Greek as well as into the Latin Church ; for in both there is the true and the false, as in everything else on earth. Turn now to the native historians of the Greek Church, and you find in full what Stanley and other Anglican Church writers only hint at. The assertions of the miraculous stand on almost every page. Of the Greek Church as it still exists in the East, I have given as many of these proofs as my space allows. In Platon and Mouravieff, the historians of the Russian Church, a patriarchate of the Greek, they are so abundant, that I shall confine myself to Mouravieff, as he is of our own time. He says, ' When the Church of Georgia, now only a short time back, became an integral portion of the Russian Church and empire, after having stood alone, cut off and isolated from all other churches ever since the fourth century, there was not found to have arisen in the course of fifteen hundred years the slightest difference between them in doctrine—no, nor even in ceremonies ; but they agreed in all points with us and with the other oecumenical thrones of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and with.the other churches dependent upon the first of them in Moldavia, Wallachia, Servia, Montenegria, Transylvania, Illyria, and in a word, throughout all Sclavonia' (Preface, p. 4). This is decisive as to the continued belief in all things which I have quoted from their ancient historians, reaching down not to the fourth century, as here noted, but to the seventh. This may save us much farther quotation". This assertion is fully supported by the Rev. R. W. Blackmore, the translator of Mouravieff, graduate of Merton College, Oxford, and chaplain in Cronstadt to the Russian Company. In his preface, he says, ' This history exhibits the instructive spectacle of a church, which, ever since her first foundation, has faithfully retained that creed which was at the first de- livered to her; which has not altered her doctrines, or her services, her rites, ceremonies, or discipline, and very slightly THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 47 her internal government (and that more in form than in spirit), for nearly nine hundred years; during which long period, both clergy and laity have enjoyed free access to the sublime liturgies of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom in their native tongue. Her apostolic hierarchy and priesthood, first received from Greece, she has venerated through all the periods of her history alike, and has preserved with the utmost care in all their integrity. She has always founded on her unbroken succession from the patriarchal throne of Constantinople and from the apostles themselves, her claim to divine authority in teaching and administering the sacra- ment,' &c. (Translator's Preface, p. xiv.) Accordingly, throughout his history, we find M. Mouravieff and his church acknowledging the metropolitans Peter, Alexis, and Jonah, as ' wonder-workers' (p. 303). He tell us that his or her 'angel' is the customary phrase in Russia for the patron saint after whom any one is named ; but that they also believe in guardian angels appointed to each baptized person (p. 360). The church counts, as its chief guardians and intercessors, a considerable number of saints (p. 81). The Russian Church believes firmly in ' the doctrines of the holy Icons (pictures of saints and the Virgin), in relics, the sign of the venerable cross, of tradition, of the mystery of the most pure blood and body of Christ, of the invocation of saints and angels, of the state of souls after death, and of prayers for the departed' (p. 273). In the time of Peter the Great, the Anglican Church made application to be ad- mitted to unity with the Oecumenical Church, and desired the Russian patriarch to transmit their prayer to Constantinople ; but the Russian prelates, having consulted, declined, because the Anglican Church had heretically renounced the traditions of the Fathers, the invocation of saints, and the reverencing of Icons — sacred pictures (p. 287). Warnings received in divine and prophetic declarations by eminent prelates, as well as cases of miracqlous cure at the tombs, or from the prayers of holy men, the successful drawing of lots laid on the altar, 48 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. and like proofs of spiritual intervention, will be found numer- ously throughout Mouravieff; and with this I may conclude the ample substantiation of my assertion of the universal credence by the Christian Church of the divine and imperish- able powers of that church — Protestantism alone having fallen from that faith. Who must not lament that a church which has done so much to purify Christianity from the faults and corruptions which have crept into it, should have been led by the arch-enemy to run into an error which has done far more than neutralizing these great benefits, has laid the foundation of an incredulity, which, under the name of phil- osophy, is going like a dry rot through the timbers of the whole temple of religious faith ? THE WALDENSES. 49 CHAPTER III. SUPERNATURALISM IN THE WALDENSIAN CHURCH. Moti milhier d'angels seren en sa compagnia; Tuit faren festa e auren grant alegria Del cavalier vittorios, compli de vigoria, Que vence lo demoni cum tota sa baglia. . Lo novel Confort. Old Waldensian Poem, a. d. 1100. THE Vaudois or Waldenses have furnished a topic of mnch contention to the ecclesiastical writers. Some have as- serted that they have been a church from the days of the apostles, continuing pure in doctrine and in constant opposi- tion to Rome ; others that they date only from the twelfth century, and originated with a certain Peter Waldo of Lyons. Some have stated that they were only a branch of the Albi- genses, and descended from the Manichaeans, who appeared at Albi, near Toulouse in Provence, in the twelfth century; but the simple truth seems to be that they were from the time of Pope Silvester, about a. d. 314, when the corruptions of the church became obvious, through its being constituted a State church. At that period, being pure members of the church, they became a protesting party; but were not for a long time afterwards absolutely separated from the Roman Church, and thus forming a separate church or sect. They protested against the assumption of worldly power by the pope; declared Rome the true Babylon, and the pope Anti- Christ ; declared that those only who read and followed the Gospel were the true Church of Christ; that there were no ranks in the ofeurch except bishops, priests, and deacons. II. —5 50 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. They protested against the mass and its ceremonies as dam- nable, and against all the tribes of mouks and nuns ; against benedictions and consecrations ; against all oaths and pil- grimages ; against purgatory, which they declared an inven- tion for gain; against confession to priests; against all pictures and images in churches ; against the forty days' fast, and fasts in general; against extreme unction ; against invocations of saints, and prayers for the dead. In fact, they were in their creed and practice strictly primitive. Being violently persecuted by the Papal Church in consequence, they retired into the fastnesses of the Piedmontese Alps, and there maintained themselves against their enemies. In the early part of the twelfth century, they became conspicuous by the simple fact that Popery had then become powerful and extremely domineering, and was determined to crush all who differed from it, wherever they could be found. Hence the terrible persecutions which continued, not only against them, but against the Albigenses in France, the Cevennois, the Huguenots, and the Lollards, and succeeding Reformers in England and everywhere. The Waldenses drew their name from the valleys in which they lived; they were first called Vallenses, or Valdesi, or Vaudes, according to the French or Italian prevalence of pronunciation. The Papal Church endeavored to heap upon them, according to its custom towards all which it deemed heretics, the most base calumnies. They were represented as monsters, having four rows of teeth, hair like wild beasts, as being addicted to the most vile habits, and rebels against the magistracy and the holy church. Numerous authorities, how- ever, both of friends and enemies, as those of De Thou, Clau- dius, Seyssel, Coggeshall, Gerard, and others having oppor- tunities of personal knowledge, pronounce their character for piety and purity of the most admirable kind. They were, in fact, amongst the earliest Protestants, far prior to the times of Huss, Wycliffe, and Luther, and continue so to this day. During the Protectorate, Cromwell interfered to check THE WALDENSES. 51 the terrible persecutions of them by their ruler, the Duke of Savoy; and Milton not only wrote flaming letters in Crom- well's name to the Duke of Savoy, to Louis XIV. of France, and to the States of Holland; but also penned that noble sonnet on their behalf, commencing — Avenge, 0 Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie bleaching on the Alpine mountains cold. Cromwell did not satisfy himself with writing and threat- ening, but he sent Sir Samuel Morland to Piedmont to use personal exertions in favor of the Waldenses, and to relieve their necessities. Morland collected one-and-twenty volumes of MSS. regarding the history and doctrines of this ' Israel of the Alps,' which were deposited in the University of Cam- bridge ; but of these, seven of the most important volumes were abstracted by the Catholics during the reign of James II., and are lost forever. Morland, however, had made good use of them in his ' History of the Church in Piedmont;' and from him, Perrin, Brez, Leger (who was a pastor in the val- leys in the seventeenth century), from Henri Arnaud (who also died the pastor of the Wiirtemburg colony of the Wal- denses in 1721), we derive a striking history of this noble people, whose characteristics and condition have been made more recently familiar to the British public by the Rev. Prebendary Gilly of Durham, and to foreigners by Hahn's ' Geschichte der Ketzer,' aud Muston's ' Histoire des Vau- dois.' Peter Waldo, who has been vainly advanced to the honor of being the founder of this people in the twelfth cen- tury, was, no doubt, a man who had visited the Waldensian mountains and brought thence the faith to his native place, Lyons — whence he, of course, obtained the surname Waldo or Waldensis, and whence the doctrines of his alpine Prot- estantism spread through the south of France. In the writings of the Waldenses, we find little mention of miracle?. They were too much opposed to the teachings of Rome, too much afraid of its dogmas to touch much on miracle, know- ing that Rome was, by that time, too apt to mingle fable 52 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. with the truth. It is not, therefore, in their writings that we are to look for miracle, so much as in their history. That history was one of continued persecution for four long cen- turies, and of frequent deliverances of so striking a kind that the narrators of them are compelled to exclaim that they are divine. The "persecutions, which had paused for some time, were renewed in 1400 with increased fury. In 1487 Pope Inno- cent VIII. issued a bull against them ; and his legate, with 18,000 men, supplied by the Duke of Savoy and the King of France, committed many horrible atrocities in the valleys of Lucerne, Angrogne, and other places. In 1550 the Mar- chioness of Saluzzo, Margaret de Foix, perpetrated a mon- strous amount of devil work in her territories. Francis I. of France, making himself master of Piedmont in 1534, con- tinued this devil work in God's name. This was perpetrated on his own subjects when Duke Emmanuel Philibert regained his estates, under a certain Earl of the Trinity—of all men; and raged on under the instigations of the Pope, and of a society founded in 1650 for the propagation of the faith and extirpation of heresy, till 1658, under such horrors of exter- mination ; their valleys desolated with fire and sword, women dishonored, ripped up with swords, children stuck on spears and hurled down rocks, &c, that Cromwell and other Prot- estant princes were compelled to interfere. These interven- tions, however, produced little effect. Victor Amadeus II., their sovereign, incited by Louis XIV. of France, pursued them still with horrible ferocity. In these wars of extermination, this Christian people per- formed deeds which resemble nothing but the marvellous acts of the Jews under the direct guidance of God. On one occasion, only seventeen men, of whom six only were armed with slings, drove before them enemies fifty times more nu- merous. They defended the little hamlet of Rora, consisting of but fifty houses, for some time against the combined attack of 10,000 men ; and, when no longer able to resist this over- PERSECUTIONS IN PIEDMONT. 53 whelming force, made good their retreat. At another time, being compelled to march in the night, they had to wrap their guides in white sheets that they might discern them, and in this manner they proceeded along the faces of the most frightful precipices, and carrying their wounded on horseback along this terrific path ; yet all escaped in safety. When, by daylight, they saw over what awful places they had passed, they were terrified at the view; and Leger, their pastor, says, any one who had not Deen in the transit would treat the whole recital as a fiction. Frequently they succeeded in sallying from the rocks and caverns in which their enemies were endeavoring to suffocate them with smoke of burning wet straw or brushwood, or to burn them alive in their retreats, and chased them down headlong into the plains, till the French and Savoyard troops declared they must be aided by God. But in April, 1686, the united power of France and Savoy made a tre- mendous onset on the unhappy people, and so completely conquered them that, after two days' hard and uuequal contest, the Waldenses laid down their arms and sued for mercy. Fourteen thousand of them, says Arnaud, their gal- lant leader and pastor, were thrust into the prisons, which were glutted with them; and there, he asserts, that no fewer than 11,000 perished of cold, of heat, of hunger, of thirst, and all the miseries accompanying them. Only 3,000 of the 14,000 issued out alive. Those who had refused to sub- mit dispersed themselves into Switzerland and the Protestant States of Germany — Wiirtemberg, Durlach, Hesse Darm- stadt, and Brandenburg. There was one little band of less than nine hundred men which determined to return and fight their way into their own mountains — this was headed by Henri Arnaud, their pastor. In the night betwixt August 16 and 17, 1689, they crossed the lake of Geneva in boats, and commenced a march which, to all human calculation, could be only one to certain destruction. They had to cross snow-capped mountains, and 5* 54 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. thread passes through a country swarming with hostile troops, French, Swiss, and Savoyard Catholics. Did they escape, there was at least a fifteen days' probable march, and a host of inveterate enemies to receive them. Arnaud, in reviewing this wonderful march, as admirable, though not so long, as the retreat of Xenophon, cannot help exclaiming in wonder, ' L'Eternel s'est servi, non pas d'un homme verse dans Part de la guerre, mais d'un pauvre ministre qui n'avait jamais fait de la guerre qVa Satan, pour faire paraitre d'au- tant mieux sa force et sa puissance. Et cependant, vous avez vu cet homme, sous les etendards celestes, s'ouvrir son passage partout, faire prisonniers comtes, barons, gentils- hommes, avocats, syndics, chatelains, moines, pretres et autres, presqu'au nombre de 67, qu'il menait avec lui pour contempler les merveilles que la veritable foi est capable d'opeYer, et pour etre au meme temps les temoins oculaires de bon ordre qu'il maintenait dans sa troupe, n'ayant rien pris partout ou il a passe qu'il ne l'eut paye ; et enfin, avec dix pistoles seulement, il penetre avec toute sa troupe jusque dans les vallees, dans la Canaan qu'il cherchait, et oil en ar- rivant, il ne lui restait plus qu'nn demi-louis.' He expresses his wonder that he did not fall into the hands of the Catholic Swiss, who were on the look-out to seize and carry him to Constance, to burn him as the Austrians had burnt Huss and Jerome of Prague. Equal wonder how they managed to force passes against countless enemies, where a few hundred men might have defied thousands. How, with a little band, covered only with rags, and subsisting on the most scanty and wretched fare, he cut his way through the lately victorious bands of France, Switzerland, and Savoy. 'Is it not wonderful,' he asks, 'that such a handful of starving men, few of whom had ever handled a musket, forced the passage of the bridge of Sababertran against 2,500 well-entrenched men, killing 600 of them, and losing only fourteen or fifteen, of whom more than eight were shot through the inexperience of their comrades ? Who is so WALDENSIAN DELIVERANCES. 55 dull,' he asks, 'as not to see that God alone could give vic- tory to a mere parcel of men, without money and almost without arms, against the King of France, before whom all Europe trembled, and whose banner the Pope had blessed in certain assurance of triumph ? Who could be stupid enough to ascribe it to nature, and not to a Divine Provi- dence, that the people of the valleys had not in summer reaped their crops, but found, on their return to the valley of St. Martin, bread, wine, meat, rice, legumes, flour, corn, cut and uncut, their gardens in fine condition, and a plentiful gathering of chestnuts and grapes ; and, moreover, that the corn which they were not able to cut in time, was preserved under the snow, through a long and hard winter, till the fol- lowing January, February, and even May, without being spoiled ? Can any one believe that about 367 people of the valley of Balsill had been able, on a diet of herbs, beans, and water, and lying on straw, to resist 10,000 French and 12,000 Piedmontese, who had besieged them, not only with abun- dance of arms, ammunition, provisions, and everything, and who had brought mules loaded with ropes to hang them with, and had done this by any other power than the direct power of God, who is the King of kings, and jealous of His honor ? That the Waldenses fought more than eighteen battles against these swarming hosts which had penetrated into their valleys, and destroyed above 10,000 of them in their march of nine days, yet lost only about seventy of them- selves ? And that, at length, their unnatural ruler should be compelled to seek the aid of the very men whom he had thus hunted down, whose fields and houses he had burnt, and whom he had given up as prey to the French and papal commissioners ?' This last event was occasioned by the French and Ama- deus II. coming to open feud and war. Thus the miserable duke sought humbly to these his outraged subjects to save him from the very hell-hounds that he had turned loose on them. Thus this despicable duke published in all haste an 56 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. edict in May, 1694, by which he restored the Waldenses to all their property and rights, and gave them full freedom of religion. Then he whiniugly told them that, if they would be true to their duke as they had been to their God, he would love and cherish them as dear children. The loyal people joined his standard, helped him to beat back his most formidable foe, and were immediately rewarded for their gal- lant conduct by being deprived again of all rights; and all who were not born in the valleys were ordered, on pain of death, to quit them within two months. The number of these amounted to 3,000. They were driven away in the most destitute condition; and the noble Arnaud volunteered to lead them into Protestant countries. They marched to Ge- neva, and thence into Prussia, Hesse Cassel, Hesse Darm- stadt, Wiirtemberg, and other States, where lands and villages were assigned them; and there they remain, as Wal- densian colonies, to this day. For many years they received a considerable money allowance from England, the English Government also paying annually 250Z. for the support of thirteen pastors in the valleys of Piedmont. Arnaud received a pension from England, and was made a colonel of the British army by William III. He died the head of the Wiirtemberg colony in 1721. It is only in very recent times that the Waldenses have received decent treatment from their own Government, but their faith is now rapidly revo- lutionizing the north of Italy. Such was the spiritualism of the Waldenses. Well might Arnaud declare that the interpositions of God on their be- half were 'non seuleraent extraordinaires, mais ineme sur- naturels.' Well may Leger, their historian (Histoire des Eglises Evangeliques Vaudoises) declare their deliverances as 'most miraculous.' On one occasion he says, they were carried off in great numbers from their harvest fields, and cast into different prisons; but their enemies, to their un- bounded astonishment, soon found them all at liberty again, equally to the amazement of the captives themselves, who OPINION OF BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX. 57 knew nothing of the arrest of their fellows in different places at the same time, and were set free again ' miraculously,' and in a wonderful manner. It was of this miraculously preserved church that even the veuerable St. Bernard, of Clairvaux, iu 1140, said, ' There is a sect which calls itself after no man's name, which affects to be in the direct line of apostolic succession, and rustic and unlearned though it is, yet it contends that we are wrong and that it is only right;' and he adds in the true spirit of Catholic priests of to-day, as expressed towards spiritualism, ' It must derive its origin from the devil, since there is no other extraction which we can assign to it' (Sermo sup. Cant. 66). What their faith was the great Bernard might have read in the 'Nobla Leycon,' the poem expounding their doctrines,' and extant at least forty years before. This people, whose origin was thus charitably ascribed to Satan, is now being held as especial favorites of the Church of England ; and has wrung from one of its mem- bers, William Stephen Gilly, Prebendary of Durham, other- wise so incognizant of the miraculous, this sentence, ' It was the will of God that they should be left as a remnant, be- cause it was written in the counsels of heaven that they should continue as a miracle of divine grace and providence' ('Waldensian Researches,' p. 289). 58 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL CHAPTER IV. / J THE SUPERNATURAL AMONGST THE SO-CALLED HERETICS AND MYSTICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. That effect, that sanguinary struggle with which humanity wrestling, so to speak, against itself, seizes one by one the most necessary truths, the bad grace with which it is done, and the incapacity of not doing otherwise, indicate two things at once; the first, that man cannot do without the truth; the second, that he is not in fellowship with the truth. But truth is one, and all those truths successively discovered are only parts, or diverse applications of it. Vinet's Vital Christianity, p. 72. Spricht man aber, wie jetzt die Zeiten laufen, solche Worte aus, sogleich wird aus der Feme dumpfer. immer n'aher kom- mender Schall der Larmtrommel vernommen; wie der Staub auf den Wegen, so wild ein zahlreich Volk vom geschlagenen Wirbel aufgeriihrt; Vater und Alterviiter und ihre Kinder und Kinders Kinder kommen in hast herbeigelaufen, alle rufend: Mystik, Aberglauben, Pfaffentrug, Monchbethorung, nieder mit der Mystik. Die Chriatliche Mystik, von J. Gorkes, i. 1. But if, as the times go, one but utter such words, immedi- ately we hear from a distance the dull, but ever-approaching sound of the alarm-drum. Like the dust on the roads, a swarm of people are roused into a furious whirlwind; father and grandfather, and their children and children's children, come running in hot haste, all shrieking, ' Mysticism ! Super- stition ! Priestcraft! Monkscheatery! down with Mysticism!' BESIDES the Waldenses there were numbers of other so- called heretics, so called by the Roman Church. In every age of the church these so-called heretics have abounded, from the earliest Manichaeans, Pelagians, and Montanists to the Flagellants and the Anabaptists of West- FAITH OF HERETICS IN THE SUPERNATURAL. 59 phalia. The idea which numbers of writers have employed to account for these manifestations, that they result from mere delusion, from excited imaginations, and hallucinations, is the shallowest of ideas; the result of the profoundest ignorance of the human soul. The cause assumed is utterly inadequate to the production of the effects ; it is an attempt to raise a fountain higher than the spring-head. In the worst of these demonstrations things have been done and prophecies enunciated which nothing but a spiritual power, seeing farther than man sees, could originate. It is not the property of disease and delusion to strike out truths, and truths lying often buried in the depth of years and distances. I have produced too many instances of such things arising out of the most disorderly spiritualism in every age and in every country, to make it requisite to reproduce them here. Even fools, so called, have often astonished the so-called wisest and soberest men by their flashes of superhuman knowledge. Take ancient or modern times, we find it the same. Nicetas Goniates relates in his life of Isaac Angelus that, when the emperor was at Rodostes, he paid a visit to a man called Basilicus, who had the reputation of possessing the faculty of seeing into futurity, but who was otherwise regarded by all sensible persons as a fool. Basilicus received the emperor without any particular marks of respect, and returned no answer to his questions. Instead of doing so, he walked towards the emperor's picture, which hung in the apartment, scratched out the eyes with his staff, and attempted to strike the hat from his head. The emperor took his leave, setting him down as a perfect fool. Nevertheless, all that Basilicus intimated came to pass. The emperor was deposed in a rebellion, and his brother Alexis, being placed on the throne, put out his eyes. Claus, the court-fool at Weimar, rushed into the council- room on one occasion, as the council was sitting, exclaiming, 'There you all are, consulting, no doubt, about very import- ant matters; but nobody gives a thought about the fire at 60 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. Colmar, nor how it is to be extinguished !' On the arrival of the mail it was found that at that moment an alarming fire was raging at Colmar. How did these fools come at knowledge which none of the wise could pretend to ? To say that it was the result of their foolishness would be to confound all human ideas ; it was clearly no delusion in either case, it was no hallucination, but a reception of a fact from some spiritual source, as certain as that of the most orthodox prophecy. And what is curious, the sane and the learned receive precisely the same sudden and unerring oracles. At Perouse in 1616, says Bodin Angevin in his ' Demonomanie des Sorciers,' a priest of the name of Jacques, one day, while celebrating mass, turned round to the people, and instead of saying, ' Orate, fratres !' he exclaimed, ' Orate pro castris ecclesiae, qua laborant in extremis.' ' Pray for the army of the church, which is in extreme peril.' And, at the moment that he was speaking, the array in question was defeated about twenty- five leagues from Perouse. It was under similar circumstances that Apollonius of Tyana, in the midst of a lecture at Ephesus, announced the death of Domitian at Rome. Even in what appears as disease, the patients speak things that no disease can teach. In St. Cyprian's Epistles we find Fermilianus writing to him that, when all the faithful took to flight in the persecution a. d. 260, a woman suddenly ap- peared who fell into fits of extacy, in which she showed her- self a wonderful prophetess. She not only foretold extraor- dinary things which came true, but she did marvellous things, and performed real miracles. But these Fathers did not foolishly imagine that her abnormal state was mere disease, or that miracles done and true prophecies made could result from hallucination, that illusion could be the parent of truth. They were incapable of any such shallow logic; they at once attributed the effects to spirits, and the woman asserted the same thing. THE SHEPHERDESS OF CRET. 61 In the ' Pastoral Letters' of Jurieu, we have an extraor- dinary account of a young girl amongst the Protestants of the south of France, who was about seventeen years of age, and was known by the name of the Shepherdess of Cret. She fell frequently into extacies and convulsions, and a deep accompanying sleep, in which she uttered the most striking and real predictions; and though she was ill-educated and spoke a wretched patois in her waking state, in these sleeps she spoke excellent French. She recollected nothing of what she had said after being awoke. She was a clairvoyant, ex- hibiting the exact phenomena of clairvoyants of to-day. She was a mystic, according to Gorres's classification, of the lower or natural order, as distinguished from the higher class of mysticism, the spiritual revelation which ascends above all natural causes, and is in communion with purified spirits, not with lower spirits, but with God Himself, or the highest and holiest of His angels. Fernelius gives the account of a young gentleman who was attacked by convulsions which came on him several times a-day. As these fits proceeded, he became very clair- voyant in them; began to speak in Latin and Greek, though he was thoroughly ignorant of Greek. He read the thoughts of every one about him, and rallied the physicians on their ignorance of his complaint and their absurd remedies. He asserted that a spirit gave him the knowledge and language which he clearly had not from any natural source; yet the magnetists satisfy themselves that magnetism will explain all. In fact that magnetism can teach a man in a moment not only to understand, but to speak Latin and Greek. In scores of cases such patients have spoke learned languages ; in the Witch cases there were abundance of such instances. If this explanation be true, why do not the magnetists intro- duce magnetism at once into our classical schools, and save our poor lads a world of crucifying labor ? If illusion can teach languages, why not our wise literary and scientific men introduce illusion to the schools, which is obviously a much IL —6 62 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. more efficient teacher than all the ordinary masters put together ? What matters it by what means our children are endowed with the full mastery of the classics, whether it be by magnetism or illusion, or hallucination, it these can give that in one hour which Dr. Birch and the Rev. Prosody Long-labor take seven years to do at Harrow or Eton ? It is amazing to find people, who have such glib and off-hand explanations of wonderful effects, taking no pains to give us the practical advantage of their discoveries. We find the apparently most ridiculous means producing most astonishing ends. The niece of Pascal was undoubtedly cured of an otherwise incurable disease by the touch of a thorn called holy; some of the most otherwise incurable cases were cured at once by the wiping with a napkin brought from the tomb of the Abbe" Paris, as people were cured by napkins and handkerchiefs taken from the body of St. Paul. Cotton Mather in his ' Magnalia Christi Ami- cana,' says nothing was so common for the old set of Quakers as to proselyte people by merely stroking or breathing upon them. It was the same in the pagan world ; causes as ap- parently trivial or foolish produced effects out of all propor- tion to them. Laplanders, according to Olaus Magnus, fell asleep after certain ceremonies, when required to obtain exact information from far-distant places, or countries ; and, after perhaps twenty-four hours of such profound sleep, woke up, assured the enquirers that they had been at the place, seen the persons required, and brought certain information, which rarely, if ever, was found to be untrue. Elian, in his 'Variae Historiae,' &c, says that the cele- brated Aspasia had, when very young, a tumor on the face which extended below the chin, and thoroughly disfigured her. Her father refused to pay the sum demanded by the physicians for her cure, and Aspasia, in an agony of distress, retired to her room, bewailing her fate; there fell asleep, and dreamed that a dove appeared to her, gradually assuming the form of a woman, who bade her to be of good courage : CAUSE OF SPIRITUAL POWER. 63 to despise the physicians, and pulverize and apply the powder of the roses in one of the wreaths hung on the statue of Ve- nus, and she should be cured. She did so, and was not only cured, but became gradually so beautiful that she enchanted all men, and became Queen of Persia. What shall we say, then, to all these things which are scattered thickly over the whole mass of history and litera- ture, sacred and profane, Christian and pagan ? If, I repeat, the theory of their being illusions, or that diseases can do these wonders and inspire prophecies; if imagination, that darling resource of so many soi-disant philosophers, can effect them, in the name of common sense, why do they not abandon science and physic and hard years of study, and betake themselves to imagination, and illusion and disease, which, according to their own showing, are far more potent than health and reason, philosophy and science ? But they do not resort to these agencies, so promptly and continually invoked, to help them out of their difficulties ; and never will, simply because they know, in their own souls, that they are mere shams brought forward to conceal their ignorance. We must, therefore, look to some other and really adequate cause of the ever-recurring, ever-extending phenomena called miraculous. And this brings us back to the old and only paramount cause — spirit operating on spirit encased in matter. ' That which is born of -the spirit is spirit: that which is born of the flesh is flesh,' Christ said to Nicodemus; but that great master in Israel found it hard to understand this. ' Like the fathers of Israel,' says Dr. Ennemoser, ' the new fathers do not willingly take cognizance of things which are not a part of their faith, and which are out of their hori- zon, whether temporal or heavenly things be in question. We must, therefore, leave the new fathers, the Nicodemnses of to-day, and draw from all history a cause more potent than their causes to unlock the mystery of miracle which arises again and again in the successive generations, as surely as the sun rises and the winds blow.' 64 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. We find, then, a great spiritual power, the Lex magna of the universe, as fixed, and permanent, and omnipotent as the law of specific gravity itself, operating on the human mind in every age and country, and under every variety of circum- stance. No human force can suppress it, though it may distort it. It comes forth like light and darkness, with features of good and evil. It stands forward in prophets and inspired warriors, sublime, clear as the sun, and irresistible as its beams. It speaks, and distant ages hear it; it acts, and nature takes the impression of its blows. God descends and wields infinite power, apostles and martyrs follow and triumph over kings and hierarchies, over mind and matter, even in subjection and in death. Churches arise, and even in their corruption and inhuman pride work signs and wonders. They stamp on pure spirit and pure conscience ; they en- deavor to crush out all opposition to their boasted self-will by fire and dungeons and desolating arms; and the same spiritual potence bursts forth in the varied shapes of heresy, of damnable doctrines and even of devilry confessed. The great spiritual power is a power residing in good and evil agents, in God and His hierarchies, in the devil and his legions. The combat of sin and soul are going on forever, and exhibit their effects over all this beautiful but serpent- haunted and blood-stained earth. Where faith and religion triumph, the malignant and envious spirits of darkness seek to undermine and corrupt. They push prosperity into pride and despotism, into sensuality and voluptuousness, tending to rottenness. They rouse the venom of vengeance in the powers which have changed from holy to unholy, to stamp out the fires of denunciation and reform, which begin to kindle under their feet, to crush the purer souls who cry for God and truth. Hence arise sects and heresies; hence the mystic incensed by outrageous denunciation rushes forward into dangerous utterances, into paradoxes from which de- velop licentious falsities as surely as fungus is developed from the fermentation of decaying wood. THE LEX MAGNA OF THE UNIVERSE. 65 You cannot check the invincible operation of this Lex magna of the universe. It will burst up ever and anon, through the dry crust of petrified society, as underswelling floods burst up the ice-cover of frozen rivers. It will burst up in good or evil, in truth or fanaticism. It is there, mighty, vast, untamable, diffused through all things, through mind and matter as universally as the electric principle. Whether you notice it or notice it not; whether you repudiate it, ig- nore it, or treat it as disease and delusion, it will appear amongst you as an inevitable apparition, laughing at your theories, throwing down your philosophies, and shattering your churches. It must and will exert itself in utter con- tempt of learned dogmas, of church creeds ; it recks not whether it be denied or admitted; but, in proportion as it is coerced or recognized, it will produce blessings or mon- strosities. Like the pent-up gases of the world's interior, it will make itself felt in moral earthquakes, or show itself in blazing vol- canoes of crime and fanaticism, if it cannot steal freely through fissures and earth-pores, and fructify the roots of tree and herb. Thus it has ever been, from the days of the Maniche- ans to those of the Mormons. Whether it be good or evil, it is all spiritualism, and it is most important that men should recognize its real nature; and, instead of mocking at it, en- deavor to open the eyes of the multitude to discern that nature too ; to teach them that it is about them as sure as God and the devil exist, and operate unperceived around us and within us; that we may open up our souls to one or the other to our infinite hurt or advantage; but that, whether we cultivate or reject, this great eternal principle in its con- flicting elements will operate upon us whether we will or not. We may turn our backs on the sun —that will not prevent his shining ; we may shut our eyes to the tempest, but that will not chain the winds or arrest the forked lightning. Good and evil are set before us, we may choose which we will; spiritualism is upon us, we may have its good or evil; we 6* 66 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. cannot, by any abjuration of it, exempt ourselves from its influences, any more than we can from that of time bringing age and death. Let us now notice the progress of this great power in and around the churches during the ages preceding the Reforma- tion. Besides the Albigenses, who were so fearfully perse- cuted and exterminated in the twelfth and thirteenth centu- ries, the south of France had also ijs Waldenses, or Poor Men of Lyons, the followers of Peter Waldo; called also Insabbatati, or people wearing sabots or wooden shoes, on which they are said to have had the sign of the cross to dis- tinguish them from other peasants, not of their faith. These also had their plentiful persecutions. These had been pre- ceded by the sects of Peter de Bruys, of Heinrich, of Eudo de Stella of Brittany, and Tranchelin of Utrecht in the Neth- erlands, in the twelfth century. All these sects were equally opposed to the corruptions of the Church of Rome, though differing in many points one from another. They most of them rejected fasts, priestly confessions, oaths, purgatory, priestly absolution, the authority of the pope, the celibacy of the clergy, the extreme unction. Many of them denied the lawfulness of capital punishments and of war by Chris- tians. All were spiritualists, holding that the ancient power of Christianity remained amongst true disciples. Of this character especially were the Apostolikers, who may be regarded as a section of the French Waldenses, though arising in Italy. The founder of this sect was Ger- hard Segarelli of Parma, who instituted it in 1260, which thence spread into France, Spain, Germany, and England. Segarelli was burnt for his heresy in 1300 ; but his place was supplied by his disciple Tode Dolcino of Novara, who spread the faith in the Tyrol and Dalmatia, and was also put to death by the papal authorities in 1307. In their doctrines they condemned the corruptions of the Church of Rome, and declared that the Church of Christ in its purity possessed the power of the apostles, and the spirit of prophecy and of MEDIEVAL 8ECT8. 67 revelation. That oaths, persecutions, and papal assumptions, are deadly sins; the Gospel is the only creed of true be- lievers. Allied to the Apostolikers are the Beghards and Beguinen, who, however, took their rise in the eleventh century, and spread through the Netherlands, Germany, France, aud other countries. They were so called from the old Saxon term beggen, the same as the German beten, to pray; they were thus literally praying brethren. They lived in large houses called beguinages, though not bound together by any oath, or belonging to any particular monkish order. There were also associations of women who lived together in the same manner. Some of these remained in the Romish Church, and continue to the present day; others were pronounced heretical, and were exterminated or dispersed. From these sprang two great sects, the Brothers and Sisters of the Full Spirit or Fratricelli, and the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, of whom the Lollards were an offshoot. The Brethren of the Full Spirit prevailed chiefly in the south of France, Italy, and Sicily. They seem to have amalgamated them- selves in a great degree with the Tertianis, or Franciscans. Like the Franciscans, they bound themselves to obedience, chastity, and poverty. They denied that the pope, or any other power of the church, had any right to interfere with their ordinances, or to absolve any of them from their oaths. They believed that the reform of the church must proceed from them ; that a new outpouring of the Holy Ghost would take place on them, as great and abundant as the first; and that through them the world would be eventually converted, and so filled with love that the faithful would exceed even the apostles in virtue and grace. That they had ere this, however, to fight the great fight with Anti-Christ, as it had been revealed to St. Francis. The Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit appear to have arisen at Cologne in 1210. Amalrich von Bena has been named as their founder by Gieseler; but Hahn thinks 68 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. this improbable and not demonstrated. Amalrich, however, held the mystical pantheistic notions afterwards ascribed to Eckardt, who unquestionably belonged to this body. He believed in the perfectability of man by the union with God and the Spirit of Christ, and that no happiness was possible except through this union — a genuine Christian Buddhism, which he partook with the ancient anchorites, and also with St. Paul. But this doctrine was not held by him, as by too many of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, as a warrant for all sorts of licentiousness. This sect became more prominent nearly thirty years later — namely, in 1238, when Albertus Magnus noticed it in Cologne. In 1261 they excited several convents and monasteries in Svvabia to break their rules, as inconsistent with spiritual freedom. In 1292, under the general name of Beghardos and Beghardas, their proceedings were condemned ; and in 1306 the Archbishop of Cologne issued an edict against them. He charged them with preaching that God Himself would, some day, cease to exist; that any one was at liberty to abandon his wife in order to follow God more strictly; but that, as those who were blest by the Spirit of God were no longer under the law, they were at liberty to indulge their appetites as they pleased, or, as Hudibras expresses it: For saints may do the same things by The spirit in sincerity, Which other men are tempted to; And at the devil's instance do. And yet the actions be contrary, Just as the saints and wicked vary. They begged 'bread in the name of God,' and were, there- fore, nicknamed 'Bread-through-God.' They wore a par- ticular dress and had a particular system of associated life. Whether they carried their licentiousness so far as their papal enemies asserted, may, in many cases, be well doubted. But it is probable that there were some of them who used their Christian liberty in a genuine sense as a liberty in PERVERTED TRUTHS. 69 God; a freedom, through the power of His Spirit, from vice and the temptations to vice ; and another and a large section who were led by their lusts to wrest the doctrine of St. Paul, that they who are in Christ are no longer under the law, into an assumed charter for the commission of any crime whatever. These declared that man, becoming perfect, could do anything without doing it sinfully — a sophism which only the devil and the flesh could make possible. A great deal of licentiousness would have passed in that corrupt age with the church; but as these Beghards and Brethren of the Free Bands set themselves to denounce the sacraments of Roman- ism, they were fiercely assaulted by its authorities; and many of them were burnt in the different countries into which they had spread themselves — Saxony, Hesse, Thuringia, the Netherlands, &c. They appealed to the pope at Avignon, John XXII., but he confirmed the decrees against them, and condemned twenty-six articles of opinion of the famous Mas- ter Eckardt of Cologne. Eckardt will claim our attention again particularly, but just now we may follow the disorderly spiritualism of this sect to its farther issues. The great head-quarters of the sect remained in Cologne ; but its archbishops continued such a war upon them that, about 1357, they fled from that city and spread themselves over the north of Germany. There, at Constance and in the Netherlands, in France and Savoy, they were persecuted, and many famous men and professors burnt. Bulls were issued by Pope Urban V, Boniface IX., and Gregory XI., against them, on which both Beghards and Beghins or Swestronae Conventualae, Conventual Sisters, were painted in blackest colors. Still more heretical sects sprang out of them, as the Luciferists, Adamites, Turlupins, &c. The Luciferists main- tained that Lucifer, after his battle with Michael the arch- angel, was restored to heaven and all his glory: the Adamites held the same doctrine, and all these sects held that the Vir- gin Mary was not an object of worship, and that the Church of Rome was a fallen church. The Lollards were frequently 70 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. confounded with these, but unjustly. They acquired the name of Lollards from the Flemish word lollen or lullen, to sing in a muffled undertone, as they did in burying those who died of the plague in Antwerp, in 1300. License having been carried to its extreme by the wild section of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, there arose another fashion of people, the Penitents, who declared that God was angered at the sins of the world, and must be appeased. To effect this object they commenced a system of the most aston- ishing self-chastisements. They regarded the great plague which ravaged both Europe and Asia in 1348, as the mani- fest sign of God's wrath; and from this date they commenced their fearful discipline. They went about naked to the waist, cutting themselves with wire-lashed scourges till they ran down with blood, and at the same time singing the hymn of the last judgment, ' Dies irae, dies ilia ;' weeping and groan- ing piteously at the same time. They obtained the names of Cruciferi, Crucifratres, Flagellatores, Verberantes, Pus- serer, or Biisser. They declared that an angel had brought them a letter commanding these self-inflictions, and they pub- lished this letter, one of a considerable length. An army of Flagellants made their appearance at Avignon, and called on Pope Clement VI. to submit himself to the same disci- pline ; but he not only refused, but commanded them to cease their processions under pain of excommunication. But the papal bull did not stop the Flagellants, nor could all the severity of the Inquisition. They spread into Italy, where 70,000 at one time appeared, including in their ranks princes, bishops, clergy of various ranks, and monks. Boniface IX. caused their leader to be seized and burnt alive, and they were scattered by main force. But other armies appeared in Germany, where other burnings took place, and fresh dis- persions by military. In the beginning of the fifteenth cen- tury, Vincent Ferreri, a Spanish Dominican of great popu- larity, led a great troop of Flagellants through Spain, France, and Upper Italy; nor did this extraordinary mani- THE DANCERS. 71 festation totally disappear from Europe till 1481, having lasted 132 years. Contemporary with the Flagellants were the Dancers. They appeared, in 1374, on the Rhine and in the Nether- lands, and continued till 1418, or the greater part of half-a- century. They appeared like the ancient Bacchanti, half- naked, and with garlands on their heads — driven, say the old writers, and plagued by demons. Not only in the open air, but in churches and houses, they danced their wild dances, men and women; and in their hymns used the names of hitherto unheard-of demons. Enormous licentiousness resulted from this dancing mania; and, as it was attributed to possession by demons, exorcism was diligently applied, and the aid of St. Vitus, famous for dancing, was, on the homoeopathic principle, invoked to put it down. The dancers, like the other sects, called loudly for a new church, a church of the spirit. Other sects, as the Pastorells, which lasted seventy years or more of the same era, joined in the cry for the removal of the corrupt church and for a new one ; and they did their best to put the Roman Church down by kill- ing the priests and plundering the monasteries, and were only subdued by the soldiery. In the meantime, whilst the demon powers were thus taking advantage of the condition and the coercive domina- tion of the church, to urge men into a delirium of sin and blasphemy, mingled with cries for a new order of things, a new order was silently springing up in the souls of men who were seeking for the kingdom of heaven, not from without, but, as Christ had taught them to seek it, within. The papal hierarchy was seized suddenly with consternation by learning that the renowned Master Eckardt had joined the sect of the Brothers of the Free Spirit — was become, in the words of Schmidt, in his ' Studien und Kritiken,' their amicus et patronus. Eckardt, the celebrated teacher of Aristotle and Plato, doctor of theology, formerly professor of this science in Paris, and now Provincial of the Dominicans at 72 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. Cologne, had not only joined this heretical sect, but had put forth six-and-twenty propositions, not only asserting, but farther developing their doctrines. These Henry, the Arch- bishop of Cologne, condemned ; and, on the Brethren ap- pealing to Pope John XXII., then at Avignon, he con- firmed the condemnation, by an edict in A. D. 1330, of the first fifteen as heretical, and of two others beyond the six- and-twenty, also ascribed to Eckardt. Before the issue of this edict, Eckardt had recalled his propositions, and was dead. The propositions, nevertheless, were accepted by the Brethren, and, as we have seen, some of them wrested to their own corrupt purposes by the wild and sensual. Master Eckardt's propositions were, in substance, as fol- lows : — Being asked why God did not create the world sooner, he replied, ' God could not produce the world at first because a thing cannot act until it is; whence, no sooner was God, than He created the world; and hence we may infer that the world was eternal. God cannot be without the world : it is His other self, and eternal with Him. God brings forth His Son continually, for the producing His Son is the speaking forth His creative power; and He speaks all things in Him. All created entities, from the highest angel to the humblest spider, are one in the first origin of things. They who love not honor, nor usefulness, nor inward devo- tion, nor reward, nor the kingdom of heaven — they out of whom all these things are gone — yet of these people God still has honor, and they pay Him what is His own. I thought lately whether it were good to desire or accept any- thing from God ; and I am anxious still to deliberate ear- nestly on this; because, if I accept from God, I place myself under Him as a servant or a slave, and He Himself becomes a Lord over me by the very act of giving ; and thus we ought not to be in the eternal life. As in the sacrament the bread is wholly changed into the body of our Lord, so shall I be changed into Him, as He operates in me His own being, the same and not merely like. Whatever God the Father ECKARDT'S DOCTRINES. 73 has given to His only-begotten Son in human nature, he has given as fully to me ; whatever the sacred Scriptures say of Christ, they say of every good and divine man. Men ask, How can man work with God the works which He did thous- ands of years ago ? and they understand not that in eternity- there is neither before nor after; and therefore, all that God worked thousands of years ago, and is yet working, is no- thing but a work in eternity; and so the man who is in eternity works all these things, for he is one with God and the same. I am in God ; therefore, he who takes not these works from God, takes them not from me. I cannot be shut out from them : or God, with whom I am one, must be shut out. The Father rests not, therefore it is of necessity that the Son is born in me ; He operates and strives in me at all times, that I may be as the Son to Him. The man who ex- ists in God conforms himself to the will of God ; he will not have it otherwise, since what is of God is the will of God. Some people fast, others eat; some watch, others sleep; some pray, others are silent; but they who practise internal devotion derive more advantage in a moment than through all the outer works that they can work. Quod bonus homo est unigenitus Filius Dei. Homo nobilis est ille unigenitus Filius Dei, quem Pater eternaliter genuit. Or, as God pro- duces his Son in me, I myself am that Son and no other. God begets the Son in the soul in the same manner as He begat Him in eternity, and not otherwise. God is one in all modes and according to all reason, and without distinction ; for he who sees things sees not God. God is one, without number and above number, without intellect and above in- tellect. No distinction can possibly be comprehended in God. All creatures are absolutely nothing. I say not that they are small, or that they are not, but they are an absolute nothing. There is something in the mind which is uncreated and uncreatable; if the whole mind were such, it would be altogether uncreated and uncreatable, and this is intellect. God is neither good, nor better, nor best. He who says that IL —7 74 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. God is good, does him as much injustice as to say that white is black.' I give these propositions, because not only a great theo- logical school was based on them, called the Friends of God, but because they have had, and continue to have, a deep in- fluence on theological metaphysics. Hegel has asserted, in his ' Lectures on Religion,' that Master Eckardt had pene- trated to the very depths of religious philosophy ; and Mar- tensen, in his Works, and Baur, in the ' Tubingen Year- Book' of 1843, declared that he was not only the father of German mysticism, but, by anticipation, of modern theologic speculation. From these propositions we see at once that Eckardt's was a mind of the intensest metaphysical nature ; and such minds love to push profound psychologic propositions into utter paradox; and, in seeking to sound the abysses of thought, emerge at the antipodes, wrapped in the cobwebs of the incomprehensible, and swart with the nether flames of blasphemy. So, at least, Eckardt will appear to the general religious mind. Yet in his sermons he explained these pro- positions so as to deprive them of much of their startling audacity ; and it will be observed that he limited their opera- tion by declaring that whoever becomes one with God, con- forms, by consequence, his will to the will of God. It suited the sensual to overleap this limitation, and hence the worst portion of the Brethren of the Free Spirit rendered Eckardt's doctrines thus : —Becoming one with God, we are invested with the liberty of God. To God all things are lawful, and, therefore, to us who are in God and one with Him, all things are lawful. Master Eckardt says there can be no distinction or difference of things to God, all are one ; therefore, there is no distinction or difference of things to us, all are one to us. And there were three or four propositions included amongst those condemned by the pope, so outrageous, that Martensen and others imagine them to have been foisted in by enemies who regarded them as the legitimate results of ECKARDT'S DOCTRINES. 75 his propositions. Namely, articles fourth, fifth and sixth, which assert in every work, whether good or bad, God is equally glorified. That whoever vituperates God praises Him ; and the more he vituperates, and the greater the sin, the more he praises God. And again, the fifteenth, six- teenth, and seventeenth, which assert that if a man commit a thousand sins, if such a man were rightly disposed, he ought not to desire not to have committed them ; and that this is true repentance. That God does not particularly regard outward actions. That an outward act is not properly good, nor divine; nor is it, properly speaking, originated by God. Whether, however, these propositions are really part of those of Eckardt. as Mosheim, Ullmann, Hase, Gieseler, Baur, Schmidt, Thomson, and other German theologians contend they are, the rest are sufficiently daring and dan- gerous to repel the generality of readers from his teaching. Yet, stripped of their more extravagant dialecticisms, they probably meant no more, in the mind of Eckardt, than that Christian Buddhism common to all mystics, and which, in fact, is founded in the teaching of Christ and of St. Paul:— That the soul may become so purified that it shall retain nothing but what is absolutely divine, absolutely that which it brought from God, and carries back to Him. That in this pure and perfect unity of nature with God, it acquires the perfect liberty of God. That this liberty is not a liberty to commit sin, as the sensual interpret it, but is a perfect liberty and freedom from all sin and power of sin. That it can do nothing but what is pure and holy, because it has nothing left in it but what is pure and holy. It is in that state to which the Buddhist aspires, and to which the soli- taries of the early church aspired, and for which their vic- tories over all fleshly tendency were the preparation and the avenues. That state which Christ described when He said the Father was in Him, and He in the Father; and in which the disciples should also be in Him and in the Father, and 76 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. He and the Father should be in them, and that they should be all one. In which St. Paul said that when Christ had put all things under His feet, including death and sin, He should render up the kingdom to God, and God should 'be all in all.' It is this state in which the nature of God be- comes the nature of all living souls, from which all sin and frailty and tendency to sin and frailty are purged out; a condition of perfect and boundless holiness, power, and per- fection, towards which all earnest aspirants, pagan or Chris- tian, a Socrates, a Plato, a Buddha, St. John, a Simon Stylites, a Fenelon, a Fox, a Wesley, or a Swedenborg, have, in all ages and regions, striven and suffered, walking the rugged paths of life in tears, in daily martyrdom, in shame and persecution; but at the same time in joy and triumph, far beyond the conception of the rejoicing and the triumphs of the world — seeing before them, and above them, and within them that Paradise of God long since shut out from our vision by the clouds of mortal passion, but never lost from the memory and the hopes of the most abject —that home-land in which God had walked with Adam, and is still walking with the saints — the land of divine liberty, which is divinest love; it is this state which Master Eckardt really sought to designate, though his spec- ulative genius led him into tropes and figures made unbe- fitting by his intensest yearnings. So Suso, his admiring disciple, read him ; so Tauler of Strasburg, Heinrich of Nordlingen, Rulman Merswin of Strasburg, and others, read him; and on these purified in- terpretations arose, with these great men, the Society of the Friends of God. These Friends of God, like the Methodists of the present day, did not abandon their union with the church to which they belonged ; they sought only to organize an association for mutual comfort and strength, not to found a new heretical sect. They sought to imitate Christ, and to restore the original purity of the church. Their opposition was not to the church itself, but to the corruption of its THE WINKELERS. 77 doctrines and the immorality of the clergy. Their zeal was not to throw down the organic constitution of Catholicism, but for the purification of it and for comfort for the people at large. They stood as a middle link betwixt the church and the Waldenses; and in the bosom of the Waldenses also arose another Society of the Friends of God, at the head of whom stood Nicolas of Basle, who was eventually burnt as a heretic at Vienne ; Berthold von Rohrbach, put to death at Speir; and Martin of Mayence, who also was burnt at Co- logne in 1393. None of these wholly rejected the doctrines of Catholicism. They honored the Virgin highly, but rejected the worship of images ; some of them frequented mass, but contended that the" laity might perform it as lawfully as the clergy. They preached and wrote books in the mother-tongue, and thus vastly extended the circle of their operations. In close connection with these associations, was another called the Brotherhood of the Winkelers, a German word indicating workers in corners, or in secret places. Rohrich, in his ' Friends of God,' says, that these Winkelers, or confessors of the people, were not located merely in Strasburg, or were the leaders of the association there merely ; but they were missionaries, leading a wandering life, instructing individuals as they met with them, and confirming in the faith those already converted. They were men of blameless life and strict morals, remaining single not from a notion of the sanc- tity of celibacy, but to enable them to devote themselves more entirely to their duties. From the impression of a direct divine call, they endured the hardships of a self-denying life, which frequently was terminated by a violent death. They were twelve, after the number of the apostles, and they were regarded by their followers as the only genuine priests. They were supported by the contributions of the association ; and when they came amongst the believing brethren, they were received as guests by those of property. Others gave them money, which they distributed. When a new Master was 7* 78 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. needed, he was elected from youths of pure morals. For this solemn choice the whole community came together, and seating themselves in a circle around the proposed Master, each one gave his judgment whether he was of a pure life, and worthy of becoming a Master. After proper enquiries and satisfactory answers, the young man was desired to stand up, and was exhorted to lead a chaste life and to remain voluntarily poor; whereupon he solemnly pledged himself never to forsake the faith. So he became Master, and was greeted as such. From this time he must prosecute no other business, nor follow any trade ; he must live exclusively the life of a teacher; and possess no property, but subsist on the offerings of the brethren and sisters. There were not only Masters but Mistresses, who were chosen in the same man- ner ; but of their particular duties we have no certain infor- mation. In the absence of a Master, one of the community offered exhortations ; and meetings were much oftener held when Masters were absent than when present; but when a Master arrived amongst them, the occasion was celebrated by a general feast and rejoicing. The Winkelers kept no sacred holiday, except Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide; as to Mary's days and Apostles' days, they regarded them not. They had no faith in purga- tory. They took the sacrament in the churches; but they held that a material church was no church, and that they could confess to one another, and that wherever they were, they could pray and be heard of God. As for masses, public almsgivings, prayers and singing for the dead, they regarded them as of no real avail; nor did they put faith in holy water, nor the blessing of meats, cakes, candles, &c. Of these Winkelers, who were regular Protestants, no fewer than eighty were condemned to death at the stake in Stras- burg in 1222, together with their Master, Johannes. But, before closing this chapter, we must take a nearer view of the Friends of God, and especially of Tauler, Nicolas of Basle, and Rulman Merswin. Much light has been thrown THE FRIENDS OF GOD. 79 upon the lives and characters of these great men by the dis- covery of a large folio volume found in the archives of Stras- burg, and formerly belonging to the convent of the Knights of St. John in that city. The English reader has been made acquainted with the contents of this volume by Miss Susannah Winckworth in her ' Life and Sermons of Dr. John Tauler.' The discovered folio contains the correspondence of Nicolas of Basle with Rulman Merswin, who established a company of Friends of God in the convent of the Knights of St. John on an island in the Rhine, called the Gruenen-Woerth, or Green Meadow. In it were found the letters and religious experiences of Tauler, Nicolas, and Merswin up to 1382. And most re- markable they are. The central figure is Nicolas of Basle, who, though only a layman, had, with his pious friends, en- tered on a course of religious reform which threatened to revolutionize the whole of the Popedom. It was, therefore, necessary that this work should be carried on with all possi- ble secrecy, or their lives would have been cut very short. They attacked the rank corruptions of the church, and even its learning, if unbased on the direct teachings of the Divine Spirit. Nicolas, therefore, comes forth, ever and anon, like an apparition from some hidden scene, whence he sees the movements of the world. He bears no name on such occa- sions but the ' Man from the Oberland ;' and, his mission ac- complished,- he retires again to his invisible abode, which is known only to his four intimate friends. Thus we have him suddenly appearing in Strasburg for the conversion of Tauler. Dr. John Tauler was a learned and eloquent preacher of that city. His preaching excited the wonder of the country far round. Nicolas of Basle came to hear him. Having heard him, he desired to confess to him ; but in his confession Tauler is struck with astonishment at his words. He tells Tauler that he is really come, not so much to hear him as to show him that he has not yet qualified himself to preach. That to do that effectually and acceptably to God, he must first empty himself of all his mere human learning and self- 80 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. knowledge, and, like a child, sit down and learn of God, whose Spirit in one hour will teach him more than all the schools in a whole life. Tauler is struck with the truth of this ; he de- sires Nicolas to put him in the way of this new teaching, and here the Man began to teach the Master. It is soon seen which is the real master in God; and Tauler, in amazement and humility, flings himself at the foot of the cross, and for two years, renouncing all preaching, submits to the tuition of the Holy Spirit in solitude, reading of the Gospel, and prayer. Once more he comes forth anew and far more wonderful man. His sermons have a life and fire in them such as bad never been witnessed by any of that time. Men and women were struck down under his ministry by scores, and lay for hours as dead, but only to revive to a more genuine life. From that day John Tauler became a great name in the church of Christ, and remains so at this age. Rulman Merswin was a wealthy merchant of Strasburg, who retired from a mercantile life to a religious one. He, too, became acquainted with the ' Man from the Oberland,' and, as to Tauler, it was a new era to him. He became in- spired with the true spirit of that real and interior religion which at once reduces all worldly wealth to its proper place, that of making men not nominal, but real Christians. He founded the convent of the Order of St. John, as an asylum for pious persons like himself, who were not bound by any oath, but lived together for the benefit of mutual edification; seeking not counsel from men, but from the Spirit of God ; and, so long as they had it, indifferent whether it flowed through priest or layman. In fact, a society of the Friends of God, based on the declaration of Christ, that they who were His genuine disciples were no longer his servants, but His friends. Rulman, like Tauler, remained in close but secret correspondence with the ' Man from the Oberland ' till his death ; no doubt actively engaged with these great and mysterious men in spreading the knowledge of Gospel truth through countries far and wide. NICOLAS OF BASLE. 81 Nicolas of Basle and his friends predicted the death of Gregory XL, which took place at the time foretold — namely, in the fourth week in Lent, 1378. They foresaw also the grand schism in the Popedom, which commenced in the following year. So deeply was Nicolas concerned for the shameful corruptions of the church and of the papal court, that in his seventieth year, in the year 1376, taking a trusty 'Friend of God' with him, he went to Rome; and, in a personal interview with Gregory, warned him of the troubles coming, and of his own death, if he did not com- mence a real and sweeping reform. The pope received this mission kindly, but did not profit by it, and died as they had foreshown. Many wonderful spiritual phenomena and reve- lations are related as attending the meetings of these Friends of God, who, after this, set out different ways into France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and other countries, to prosecute the work of Gospel reform. They fell in honored martyr- dom in different places; Nicolas himself at Vienne, in France, as already stated, when he was about ninety years of age. Many ladies were distinguished members of the Society of the Friends of God, and amongst them pre-emi- nent, Agnes, Queen of Hungary, the widow of King Andrew; and the sisters Christina and Margaretta Ebner, both nuns. For a very interesting account of the 'Friends of God,' see the 'Spiritual Magazine' for 1862, Nos. for May and August. Such were the various sects heralding the downfall of corrupt Catholicity ; good and bad, all were crying for a new order of things. The good were entering deep into the arcana of the Christian life in the soul; the bad were driven, as bv disorderly and sensual spirits, into crimes and rabid heresies. The true and the false equally maintained the doctrine of spiritual agency, and both good and bad exemplified it in their actions. There were a rabies and an orgasm running through all mortal affairs clearly drawing fire from deeper sources than mere mortal passions. The 82 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. power of God, long neglected and outraged in the Roman Church, had departed and left it open to vice, luxury, liber- tinism, and a terrible lust of dominion and destruction. Rome had scourged, martyred, and calumniated the faithful. The devil had shown to the Saviour all the kingdoms of the world, and offered them if He would bow down and worship him. The offer was declined. But it was again made to the Saviour's professed vicars on earth, and the fatal gift had been accepted. The church abandoned Christ and his poverty, and accepted temporal power, and regal instead of apostolic state. The demon virus in the gift soon operated. The church became secularized. Instead of poverty, wealth; instead of nowhere to lay their heads, the pontiffs and car- dinals, and many a proud prelate and mitred abbot, laid theirs on silken pillows in palaces. Instead of being sum- moned before kings and magistrates for Christ's sake, they sate as kings a.id judged His honest followers. By the very places the two parties occupied, was plainly indicated which of them were the disciples to whom Christ had promised the kingdom of heaven with persecutions. Instead of fasts there came feastings, instead of being surrounded by the sick seek- ing to be healed, they were surrounded by martial guards, and sate at banquets on the right hand of kings. In spite of all Christ's warnings, the world had got them and the devil. They sent out their armies and exterminated whole peoples who demanded to serve God in the ancient sim- plicity. Under Simon de Montfort, the papal legate, they ravaged Provence, drove out Raymond, the rightful sover- eign, usurped his lands, and murdered his subjects. They exterminated the whole of Christian Bohemia, by the hand of their gloomy agent, Ferdinand II. of Austria. They laid waste the mountains of the Cevennes with fire and sword, and their Inquisition in Italy, Spain, and other countries, made hell and Romanism synonymous. Everywhere the flames of burning martyrs, everywhere their instruments of torture, everywhere their arrogance, and insolence, and sen- RIPENING FOR THE REFORMATION. 83 snality, proclaimed that the gift of the devil had done its work, and that Satan reigned in the outraged name of Christ. The very cells of nuns, awful witnesses of the in- surrection of nature against spurious religionism, were de- clared to be paved with the skeletons of murdered children. Luther, in his ' Table-Talk,' p. 307, says Pope Gregory, who confirmed celibacy, ordered a fishpond at Rome, hard by a convent of nuns, to be cleared out. The water being let off, there were found at the bottom more than six thousand skulls of children, that had been cast into the pond and drowned. He adds, that in his own time, the foundations of a nunnery being removed at Neinburg in Austria, similar revelations were made. The work of the devil's gift of temporal dominion was equally efficacious on the people at large. Thrust out from all personal knowledge of the gospel, they were grown bru- tish as the beasts they tended. The spiritualism of the church had become the spiritualism of devils, and rioted in lying miracles, and forced, by its iron repression of con- science, a plentiful crop of heresies and a sanguinary harvest of martyrdom. Millions of groaning souls cried, ' How long, 0 Lord !' The times were ripe, and men's violated hearts were ripe for the great catastrophe of retribution. The avatar of reformation came at length by the natural weight of rottenness in the apostolical hierarchy, and by the mingled efforts of Huss and Wycliffe, of Luther and the crowned Balaam of reform — Henry VIII. of England, who, meaning the work of the devils of lust and murder, did the work of God. It was the era of revival, the memorable sixteenth century. The Reformation was come. 84 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. CHAPTER V. THE SPIRITUALISM OF LUTHER AND THE EARLY REFORMERS. The Christian system of the spiritual and material world stood for 1500 years unshaken. All at once, the monk Copernicus stood forth I With a mighty hand he pushed away the globe from the centre of creation, fixed the sun in its place, and bade the former make the circuit of the latter in a year, and revolve upon its axis in twenty-four hours. By this fortunate discovery much that was incomprehensible became intelligible, and much that was inexplicable, demonstrable. The pope and the clergy were struck with consternation at it. They threat- ened curse and excommunication ; but Copernicus had already made his escape from them, the earth was now in motion, and no anathema was able to arrest its progress. But Protestantism was not satisfied with this; it went far- ther. It promulgated the dogma that there were no such things as apparitions or a middle state. Luther and his con- federates renounced all claim to the government of the invisi- ble world; they extinguished the fires of purgatory, and en- larged the bounds of Hell by adding Hades to it. No middle state of purification was any longer believed in, but every de- parted soul entered upon its place of destination, either heaven or hell. Presentiments, visions, and apparitions, were re- garded either as deception, delusion, and imagination; or, where the facts could not be denied, as the work of the devil and his angels. By their decree that the pious were imme- diately after death received into heaven, and the impious plunged into hell, the gate was closed against the return of departed spirits to this world. Encouraged by this, the physical philosophers very soon promulgated the doctrine that there was nothing in the world but matter, and its properties. They delved in matter, and, finding nothing by their tests but matter, they declared that there were no powers but such as were material. But Leib- nitz was a stumbling-block to the physical philosophers; for he insisted on such things as principles of ' indivisibility' and 'predetermined harmony,' &c. Stilling's Pneumatology, p. 16 to 22. REJECTION OF MIRACLE. 85 IN the foregoing extract Stilling has correctly described the progress of modern infidelity and materialism from the act of Protestantism at the Reformation. Finding the Lord's heritage overrun with a rampant growth of the devil's tares in the shape of fictitious miracle, they forgot to consult the Lord's recommendation, so conspicuously given in the Gos- pel, to let the tares grow with the wheat till the final harvest, lest they should pull up the wheat along with them. To get rid of false miracles, they plucked up the true ; and to pre- vent the return of the false, they determined to root up the very principle of faith in the miraculous, in spite of the whole world, with its five thousand five hundred years of miracu- lous facts, protesting against so insane a rejection of its laws. In spite of the plain words of Christ and His apostles, that miracle was the patrimony of the Christian Church ; and that the mark of the true disciple should be that ' these signs should follow them that believe. In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up deadly serpents ; and, if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them ; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover' (Mark xvi. 17, 18). (I am aware that a recently discovered copy of the Gospel of St. Mark was found destitute of these words; but is it any wonder that a scroll of parchment, so rotten as to resemble an old cigar, should want a verse or two at the very end of it ? Even had this copy been in good condition, it could not set aside the evidence of copies equally ancient and authentic. The Syrian Gospel, which has been in the hands of the Syrian Church since the time of the apostles, has the passage complete.) In spite of volumes of authentic history by men of undoubted character narrating ages of such facts, prior to the corrup- tions of Rome. It was a fatal act, and being in open oppo- sition to nature and history, was certain to produce the most deplorable consequences. But Protestantism does not bear alone the blame; the Church of Rome, by its shameless traffic in miracles and in IL —8 86 HISTORY OF THE SUPKRNATURAL. the fires of purgatory in later ages, led the Protestants into this overstrained reaction. Rome caused the damage which Protestantism, in its righteous but ill-considered indignation, perpetrated. When the devil's rule is in danger, he rarely fails to find*a trap for his opponents. In this case they thought to clip his wings by cutting off miracle, and he re- commended them, as an admirable and infallible measure, to cut off the very roots of faith in it, and they fell into the satanic snare. It is not for nothing, says Luther, that the devil has been ranging about these thousands of years. So profoundly was Luther himself frightened at the very name of miracle, that he would not admit it, or even talk of it as existing in the church, if he could avoid it. ' Luther,' says Michelet, ' did not love to hear anjr one insist on the miracles. He looked upon them as a very secondary class of proofs.' Yet he was continually admitting them, if they were only connected with the . devil. He observed that ' Christ once appeared on earth visibly, showed His glory, and, according to the divine purpose of God, finished the work of redemption and the deliverance of mankind. I do not desire He should come once more in the same manner, neither would I that He should send an angel to me.' He added, that he desired no ' visions or revelations.' And here we have that mistaken idea adopted so generally by Protes- tantism, and which has proved, indeed, ' a most deadly error,' namely, that miracles and revelations once made, would serve forever. That ovidence given in one age will serve for a very distant age. Time has shown the fallacy of this idea. It has shown that evidence, like all other things on earth, wears out, and loses its life. It is precisely on this ground that the erroneous materialism of the present day rests. The evidence of the ancient miracles is so far off that people deny that it ever existed; and nothing but new miracles, those miracles which Christ promised to the end of the world, and which would have been the constant attendant of the church, LUTHER'S FEAR OF CRITICISM. 87 if men had retained their faith, can renew that faith. But more of this anon. Luther, ^however, was forced to admit that angels were 'watching and protecting ;' but he desired his followers not to trouble themselves about the manner in which*it was done : God having said it, it was sure. ' The angels,' he said, ' are all up in arms, are putting on their armor, and girding their swords about them.' Desiring no outward gifts of miracles himself, he yet added, ' Not, however, that I derogate from the gifts of others, if haply to any one, over and above Scripture, God should reveal aught by dreams, by visions, or by angels.' He, moreover, firmly believed that he was in- cited to his attack on the Papacy by direct divine inspiration; and he often spoke things prophetically concerning Charles V., concerning the affairs of Germany and of Protestantism, and he said, ' I certainly am of opinion that I speak these things in the spirit.' Believing, then, in direct spiritual inspiration, in the proba- bility that spirits, visions, and angels, might appear to others, why did not Luther wish them to appear unto himself? It was because this stout-hearted man, who did not fear the devil, like too many of to-day, was afraid of ridicule and criticism. He confessed that if God gave him the grace to work miracles, the Papists would immediately say that the devil did them by him. He had so bitterly ridiculed and so heartily abused the Catholics for their manufactured miracles, that he was now afraid to have the power of working true ones, lest they should retort. We have a striking example of this given by Seckendorf in his ' Comment, de Lutheran- ismo.' Certain persons had brought to Luther a girl eigh- teen years of age, said to be possessed of the devil. Now Luther believed firmly in possession, but had a fear of using exorcism for the reason just given. He says, ' Men are pos- sessed two.ways, corporally and spiritually. Those possessed corporally are mad people, whom he has permission to vex and agitate, but he has no power over their souls The im- 8* 88 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. pious, who persecute the divine truth, are possessed spiritu- ally.' Such men as Annas, Caiaphas, Julian the Apostate, the pope, his cardinals, bishops, and priests who persecuted Protestantism, he believed were possessed spiritually, and would not be delivered by any human means. He had a no- tion, too, that ' we cannot expel demons with certain cere- monies and words as Jesus Christ, the prophets, and apos- tles did. All we can do is, in the name of Jesus Christ, to pray the Lord God, of his infinite mercy, to deliver the pos- sessed persons.' And he adds that, if this was done in faith, it will be efficacious. ' But we cannot of ourselves expel the evil spirits, nor must we even attempt it.' In these remarks the great Reformer, so far as the apostles were concerned, makes a distinction without a difference ; for the apostles were assured by Christ that the devils did not go out without prayer and fasting. The apostles never pretended to cast out devils of themselves, but by the conferred power of God. But Luther was, no doubt, thinking of the wordy forms of exorcism employed by the Romanists. The young girl in question being brought before him, he ordered her to repeat the Apostles' Creed; but she stopped at the name of Jesus Christ, and could not pronounce it. Upon this Luther said, ' I know thee, Satan; thou wouldst have one begin exorcising with great parade; but I will do no such thing.' On the following day she was brought into the church whilst Luther was preaching, and, after the ser- vice, into a small chapel. She was thrown upon the floor in convulsions, and Luther laid his hand on her head, and re- peated over her tfie Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the words of John, ' He that believeth in me, the works that I do he shall do also, and greater works than these shall he do.' These words, one would have thought, might have inspired Luther with a bolder faith in the delegated power of Christ; and had they done so, he would have saved Protestantism a fearful loss of divine potency, and from a long dark reign of rationalistic barrenness. However, he prayed to God, with luther's visions. 89 the rest of the ministers of the church, that for Christ's sake he would cast the devil out of the girl. He then touched her with his foot, saying, ' Proud devil, thou wouldst indeed that I should now proceed against thee with great parade, but I will do no such thing. I know that thy head is crushed, and that thou liest prostrate at and under the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ!' He then went away, and the girl was taken home to her friends, who afterwards wrote that she was no more troubled by the spirit. On another occasion at Eisenach, a woman was the victim of horrible convulsions, of which no doctors could cure her; for, says Luther in his ' Table-Talk,' it was the direct work of the devil. Her hands and feet were bent into the form of horns, her tongue was dry and rough, and her body much swollen. Luther visited her, and said, ' God rebuke thee, Satan, and command thee, that thou suffer this, his divine creature, to be at peace.' He then prayed for her release from the demon, and the woman said, 'Amen.' That night, for the first time for a long period, she enjoyed refreshing sleep, and awoke in the morning perfectly well. Thus, it is clear, that Luther was a genuine spiritualist, not ignoring the divine side of it, as our clergy and literati do now-a-days, but was only afraid of throwing himself boldly into its practice from fear of that bugbear, criticism. His wife occasionally saw visions, and Luther fully believed in them. In the night preceding the death of their daughter Magdalen, who died at the age of fourteen, Madame Luther in a dream saw two beautiful youths come to her and ask her daughter in marriage. On telling the dream to Melanc- thon in the morning, he said, the youths were the angels coming to carry the dear virgin to the true nuptials of the heavenly kingdom. Magdalen died that afternoon. Luther, too, had his own visions. He says that, on one occasion, he saw two signs in heaven. One was the arch of heaven resting without any visible support; and the men of to-day he said, were trying in vain to find out where the supports 90 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. were, and to grapple them with their hands, if they could; but he felt a conviction that they never would be able to do it. Then he saw beneath him a rainbow bridge bearing up the heavens, and he saw that God could make even a slight aerial line do His will, and support the whole firmament if necessary. On another occasion, he says, ' On Good Friday last, being in my chamber in fervent prayer, contemplating with myself how Christ my Saviour on the cross suffered and died for my sins, there suddenly appeared upon the wall a bright vision of our Saviour Christ, with the five wounds, steadfastly looking upon me, as if it had been Christ Himself corporeally. At first sight I thought it had been some celestial vision, but I reflected that it must needs be an illusion and juggling of the devil, for Christ appeared to us in His word, and in a meaner and more humble form; therefore, I spoke to the vision thus, ' Avoid thee, con- founded devil; I know no other Christ than He who was crucified, and who in His word is pictured and presented to us.' Wherefore the image vanished, clearly showing of whence it came. It is pretty apparent that Luther was so possessed of the idea of'the devil that, had Christ appeared to him, as He did to St. Paul, or to St. John in the Revelations, he would have said, ' Avaunt thee, Satan 1' and lost the benefit of the vision. This was the weak side of Luther. The devil, he imagined, was so outrageous at his war on the Papacy, that he haunted him day and night in a most vindictive manner. In the ' Tischreden' or ' Table-Talk' of Luther, written down and published by his friends, we have some scores of pages relating the personal appearances of the devil to Luther, and of his conversations with him, and the Reformer's defiances of him. Luther saw devils in everything. He saw them in tempests, in diseases, in calamities. ' Many devils are in the woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark pooly places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; some are also in the thick, black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings and thun- LUTHER'S IDEAS OF SATANIC INFLUENCE. 91 derings, and poison the air, the pastures, and the grounds. When these things happen, then the philosophers say it is natural, ascribing it to the planets, and showing I know not what reasons for such misfortunes and plagues as ensue.' . . . ' I see him there, not very far off, puffing out his cheeks till they are all red, blowing, and blowing, and blow- ing against the light; furious, mad ; but our Lord Jesus Christ, who, in the outset, gave him a good blow on his in- flated cheek, still combats him vigorously, and will combat him till the end of things.' One day when there was a great storm abroad, Luther said, ' It is the devil who does this ; the winds are nothing else but good or bad spirits. Hark how the devil is puffing and blowing !' (' Tischreden,' 219.) 'The devil harasses the workmen in the mines, and often makes them think they have found new veins, and they labor and labor, and it turns out all a delusion.' Luther, taking up a caterpillar, said, "Tis an emblem of the devil in its crawling walk, and bears his colors in its changing hue. I maintain,' he said, 'that Satan produces all the maladies which afflict mankind, for he is the prince of death.' He had absolute belief in the reality of witchcraft. ' Witchcraft is the devil's proper work, wherewith, when God permits, he not only hurts people, but makes away with them ; for in this world we are as guests and strangers, body and soul cast under the devil. He is god of this world,' &c. ' Idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb, are men in whom ignorant devils have established themselves; and all the physicians who attempt to heal these infirmities, as though they pro- ceeded from natural causes, are ignorant blockheads, who know nothing about the power of the demon.' . . . ' In many countries there are particular places to which devils more especially resort. In Prussia there is an infinite num- ber of evil spirits. In Switzerland, on a high mountain, not far from Lucerne, there is a lake they call Pilate's Pond which the devil has fixed upon as one of the chief residences of his evil spirits; and they are there in awful numbers. In 92 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. Poltersberg, there is a lake similarly cursed. If you throw a stone into it, a dreadful storm immediately arises, and the whole neighboring district quakes to its centre. 'Tis the devils kept there prisoners who occasion this' (' Tischreden,' 212). Luther attributed direct acts of violence and abduc- tion to the devils. ' Satan once tried to kill our prior, by throwing down a piece of wall upon him, but God miracu- lously saved him.' 'At Sassen, the devil carried off, last Good Friday, three grooms who had impudently devoted them- selves to him,' &c, &c. Now nobody now-a-days need be told that Luther was attributing to the devil, on many occasions, the simple opera- tions of nature ; and nobody is called on to believe that the devil threw down walls, rotten probably by time, or flew away with impious grooms. The fact was, that Luther's openness to spiritual influences was made one-sided by his horror of being charged by the Papists with doing the sacred miracles, which in them he had charged to diabolism or trick. The whole weight of his spiritualism was thus thrown to the demoniac side, and on that side became exaggerated. He saw where devils were so frequently, that he at length saw them in appearances and causes where they were not. He is one of the greatest warnings against rejecting phenomena from prejudice, and not weighing well both sides, and thus arriving at a well-balanced cognizance of things. Shutting his mind against the fair side of spiritualism, he opened it not only to the palpably evil near him, but to the vague and dark beyond. There was, undoubtedly, in Luther's experi- ence, a mixture of the real and the unreal, the unreal arising from this fixed one-sidedness. The palpable personal appearances of the devil to Luther are amongst the most curious passages of his life. Every one is familiar with the fact of his throwing the inkstand at the devil's head as he interrupted his translation of the Bible in the castle of Wartburg; and many, like myself, have seen the reputed mark on the wall. The matter-of-fact manner THE DEVIL AT THE WARTBURG. 93 in which he relates these occurrences is amusing. ' When, in 1521, on my quitting Worms, I was taken prisoner near Eisenach, and conducted to my Patmos, the castle of Wart- burg, I dwelt far apart from the world in my chamber, and no one could come to me but two youths, sons of noblemen, who waited on me with my meals twice a-day. Among other things, they had brought me a bag of nuts, which I had put in a chest in my sitting-room. One evening, after I had retired to my chamber, which adjoined the sitting- room, had put out the light and got into bed, it seemed to me all at once that the nuts had put themselves in motion ; and 'jumping about in the sack, and knocking violently against each other, came to the side of my bed to make noises at me. However, this did not harm me, and I went to sleep. By and by I was wakened up by a great noise on the stairs, which sounded as though somebody was tumbling down them a hundred barrels, one after another. Yet I kuew very well that the door at the bottom of the stairs was fas- tened with chains, and that the door itself was of iron, so that no one could enter. I rose immediately to see what it was, exclaiming, ' Is it thou ? Well, be it so !' (meaning the devil) and I recommended myself to our Lord Jesus Christ, and returned to bed. The wife of John Berblibs came to Eisenach. She suspected where I was, and insisted upon seeing me ; but the thing was impossible. To satisfy her, they removed me to another part of the castle, and allowed her to sleep in the apartment I had occupied. In the night she heard such an uproar, that she thought there were a thousand devils in the place' ('Tischreden,' 208). ' Once,' he says, ' in our monastery at Wittenberg, I dis- tinctly heard the devil making a noise. I was beginning to read the Psalms, after having celebrated matins, when inter- rupting my studies, the devil came into my cell, and there made a noise behind the stove, just as though he was dragging some wooden measure along the floor. As I found that he was going to begin again, I gathered together my books and 94 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. got into bed. . . . Another time in the night, I heard him above my cell, walking in the cloister, but as I knew it was the devil, I paid no attention to him, and went to sleep.' ' It is very certain,' says Luther, ' that as to all persons who have hanged themselves or killed themselves in any other way, 'tis the devil who has put the cord round their necks, or the knife to their throats.' ' If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work, we should despair.' There are, according to Luther, three things that he is afraid of, ridicule, God's word, and sacred songs. He says he has often made him fly by calling him ' Saint Satan !' and telling hirn.that, if Christ's blood shed for man be not sufficient, he had better pray for us. Our songs and psalms sore vex and grieve him. Yet Luther had the profoundest idea of the devil's intellect and power of reason. ' The devil, it is true, is not exactly a doctor who has taken his degrees, but he is very learned, very expert for all that. He has not been carrying on his business during thousands of years for nothing' (' Tischreden,' 224). ' I know the devil thoroughly well; he has over and over pressed me so close that I scarcely knew whether I was alive or dead. Sometimes he has thrown me into such despair that I even knew not that there was a God, and had great doubts about our dear Lord Christ. But the word of God has speedily restored me ' ('Tischreden,' 12). "Tis marvellous,' says Bossuet, 'to see how gravely and vividly he describes the devil coming to him in the middle of the night, and awakening him to have a dispute with him: how closely he describes the fear which seized upon him ; the perspiration which covered him; his trembling, the horrible feeling of his heart throughout the dispute; the pressing arguments of the devil, leaving no repose to his mind ; the sound of the evil one's powerful voice, and his overwhelming method of disputation, wherever question and answer came immediately one upon the other. " I felt," he tells you, " I felt how it is people so often die suddenly towards the morn- ing. It is that the devil can come and strangle men, if not THE DEVIL ON THE MASS. 95 with his claws, at all events with his pressing arguments "' ('Variations de l'Eglise,' ii. 206). The case immediately referred to is the grand argument given by Luther in his treatise ' De Missa Privata et Unc- tione Sacerdotum,' and quoted at length in Audin's 'Vie de Martin Luther.' Luther, according to this famous colloquy, had celebrated private mass nearly every day for fifteen years. The devil, as Luther supposed the spirit to be, commenced by throwing in a doubt whether the wafer and the wine were really the body and blood of Christ, and whether he had not all that time been worshipping merely bread and wine. He upbraided him with putting the Virgin Mary and the saints before Christ, and thus degrading and dishonoring Christ. In the second place, that he had abused the institution of the mass by using it privately, contrary to its ordained purpose, and thus committed sacrilege as a consecrated priest. He sup- ported his arguments by the most apposite references to Scrip- ture. He reprehended him for depriving the people of the sa- crament, taking the elements only himself; whereas it was clear that Christ meant all His followers to partake of His sacrament. He called in question his very consecration as a priest, as having done contrary to the institution of Christ; and, telling him that, in that case, he had performed mass without due authority, and at the same time withheld the sacrament from the people. He upbraided him as impious on this account; that in the mass there was wanting the end, the design, the fruit, the uses for which Jesus Christ established the sacra- ment—that it should be eaten and drunk by the whole flock. That it was not there that Jesus Christ was Himself taken in the sacrament, but that it was not intended that a priest should take the sacrament himself, but take it with the whole church. With these and many other arguments the spirit pressed home the matter on Luther, threw him into the deep- est distress, and so completely convinced him of the sinful- ness of private masses, that he never again practised them And here we may ask whether this powerful spirit was as 96 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. Luther snpposed it, the devil, or a devil ? Is it likely that the devil, if Luther was in the practice of an iniquity, would come and reason him out of it ? All the spirit's argu- ments are sound and scriptural, and convince the Reformer. Is that the language or the object of a devil ? On the con- trary, the whole scene, and the whole of the sentiments, go to prove that the spirit was a great as well as a powerful spirit; but which Luther, from his crotchet that all spirits appearing to him were devils, could believe nothing else. Many readers, however, will move the previous question, and doubt whether Luther really saw and conversed with spirits at all; whether he were not under a mere delusion of his ex- cited imagination. On that point I should myself have doubted too, had I not seen so many things of a like nature of late years, and that only in common with some millions of people. Luther, no doubt, was a great and open medium. This was essential to his great mission. To call a man a great relig- ious reformer is the same as calling him a great spiritual medium. Without this mediumship this communication, in- timate and enduring, with the spiritual world, with the Holy Spirit and His holy angels, a man can reform nothing ; he is a dead thing, and cannot emit new life and sentiment to the world. That Luther saw and conversed with spirits, good and bad, there can be no doubt; but there can be as little that he received stories of such things from other people too credulously. As little can there be any doubt that his horror of falling into the practices which he had condemned in the Romanists had so completely usurped his mind, that to him all spirits who came were devils to his imagination, though they, as in the mass case, convicted him of error, and converted him to the truth. But if Luther, heart of oak as he was, could not see in spirits manifesting themselves to him aught but de- mons, he was a thorough spiritualist, not only in a most posi- tive faith in them, but also in the power of Christian ministers to cast them out, in the truth of witchcraft, and in the sensible inspiration of the Holy Spirit in true preachers of the gospel. MELANCTHON. 97 His contemporaries and coadjutors, if they had not more vigorous convictions than himself in spiritual agencies, had a more equably balanced faith in them. Melancthon, as we have seen, believed in Madame Luther's dream of the angels coming for her daughter's soul. He showed his firm belief in angelic interpositions on various other occasions. He re- lates a case in which he was an eye-witness. A learned and holy man, named Simon Grynaeus, going from Heidelberg to Speir, was desirous to hear a certain preacher in that city, who, in his sermon, did let fall some erroneous propositions of Popish doctrine, much derogatory to the majesty and truth of the Son of God ; wherewith Grynasus, being not a little offended, craved speedy conference with the preacher, and, laying before him the falsehood and the danger of his doc- trines, exhorted him to an abandonment of these mis-opinions. The preacher gave good words and fair semblance to Grynaeus, and desiring farther and more particular conference with him, each imparted to the other his name and lodgings. Grynaeus, upon his return to his lodgings, reported the con- ference to those who sate at table with him — Melancthon was one. Presently Melancthon was called out of the room to speak to a stranger, who had just arrived. A grave old man of a good countenance, and richly attired, in a friend's manner told him that within one hour would come certain officers as from the King of the Romans, to attach Grynaeus, and carry him to prison : wishing Melancthon to charge Grynaeus with all possible speed to flee out of Speir. This said, the old man vanished out of sight. Melancthon re- turned to his companions, and related to them what he had seen and heard. He hastened the departure of Grynaeus, who had no sooner boated himself on the Rhine than he was eagerly sought for at his lodgings by Roman officers. This worthy divine, as he is styled by Bishop Hall, in his Com- mentary on Daniel, relates these facts, and acknowledges God's providence in sending His angel to rescue His faithful subject. II—9 98 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. It is related by Leckendoye, on the authority of Solomon Glasse, Superintendent-general of Gotha, that Melancthon was recalled from the verge of death by Luther's prayers. ' Luther arrived, and found Philip about to give up the ghost. His eyes were set, his understanding was almost gone, his speech had failed, and also his hearing; his face had fallen; he knew no one, and had ceased to take either solids or liquids. At this spectacle Luther is filled with the utmost consternation — turning away towards the window, he called most devoutly upon God. After this, taking the hand of Philip, and well knowing what was the anxiety of his heart and conscience, he said, "Be of good courage, Philip ; thou shalt not die." While he utters these things, Philip begins, as it were, to revive and to breathe, and, gradually recover- ing his strength, is at last restored to health.' Melancthon, writing to a friend, said, ' I should have been a dead man, had I not been recalled from death by the coming of Luther.' A similar detention in life of Myconius by Luther's prayers is recorded; and that six years afterwards Myconius, being again at the point of death, sent a message to Luther de- siring him this time not to detain him by his prayers. Me- lancthon fully recognizes the reality of apparitions, and men- tions a case occurring in his own family. He says his father's sister appeared to her husband after death, and earnestly con- jured him to pray for her. John Calvin was not of a temperament to imagine ground- less or merely airy things. His stern mind, bent on establish- ing the sternest doctrines, even by the application of fire to recalcitrant theologians, as in the case of Servetus, was not one to originate or indulge in dreams of mere spiritual fan- tasies; yet Beza, than whom no man knew him better, being his colleague at Geneva, both in the church and the univer- sity, tells us that 'he regarded satanic wonders as superna- tural and real, not mere slights.' He says that he had a genuine spirit of prophecy, and predicted events which came wholly to pass. He had his spiritual ear open to hear sounds OPINION OF BEZA. 99 quite beyond the reach of the outward sense. ' One thing,' says Beza, 'must not be omitted. On December 19, 1562, Calvin, lying in bed, sick of the gout, it being the Sabbath day, and the north wind having blown two days strongly, he said to many who were present, " Truly, I know not what is the matter, but I thought this night I heard warlike drums beating very loud, and I could not persuade myself that it was so. Let us, therefore, go to prayer; for surely some great business is in hand." And this day there was a great battle fought between the Guisians and the Protestants, not far from Paris, news whereof came to Geneva within a day or two.' For abundant evidence of a like kind see Audin's 'Histoire de la Vie, &c, de Calvin,' and Dr. Paul Henry's 'Leben Johann Calvins.' As to Beza himself, he gives us his own opinion on these ^subjects: 'According as God in His righteous judgment grants liberty to the spirit, it is not difficult to evil spirits to misemploy a corpse ; and for the purpose of deceiving some one, to speak in it, exactly as he uses the tongues of living demoniacs. ... So also it often occurs in profane his- tories that brutes, and even idols, have spoken ; which, in- deed, is by no means to be rejected as false.' And in his Notes on the New Testament (Matthew iv. 24), he says, ' There are not wanting persons with whom demon or devil means nothing more than madness ; that is to say, a natural malady, and one which may be cured by physic. Such persons, however, are refuted both by sacred and profane histories, and by frequent experience.' Wolfgang Musculus one of the stanchest of the continental Reformers, originally a monk of Lorraine, but afterwards professor of divinity at Berne, and a great disciple of Luther's, in his Commentaries on the Scriptures, maintains the spiritual character of Chris- tianity unflinchingly. Speaking of demons, he says ' These malignant spirits lurk in statues and images, inspire sooth- sayers, compose oracles, influence the flight of birds, trouble life, disquiet sleep, distort the members, break down the 100 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. health, harass with diseases.' In fact, he believed both the histories of all the Gentile nations, and those of the Jews and of Christianity too. Coming nearer home and opening the life of the great Reformer of Scotland, we find the sternest of all stern relig- ionists, John Knox, avowing, ' I dare not deny, lest I be in- jurious to the giver, that God hath revealed unto me secrets unknown to the world ; yea, certain great revelatives of mu- tations and changes where no such things were feared, nor yet were appearing. Notwithstanding these revelations I did abstain to commit anything to writing, contented only to have obeyed the charge of Him who commanded me to cry.' The 'Truth-seeker,' in the ' Spiritual Telegraph,' has called our attention to the following passage in McCrie's 'Life of Knox,' 'It cannot be denied that the contempora- ries of John Knox considered these revelations as proceed-* ing from a prophetic spirit, and have attested that they re- ceived an exact accomplishment. ' The most easy way of getting out of this delicate subject is, to dismiss it at once, and summarily to pronounce that all pretensions to extraordinary premonitions, since the comple- tion of the canon of inspiration, are unwarranted; and that they ought, without examination, to be discarded, and treated as fanciful and visionary. But I doubt much if this mode of determining the question would be doing justice to the subject. A prudent inquirer will not be disposed to ac- knowledge as preternatural whatever was formerly regarded in this light, and will be on his guard against the illusions of imagination as to the impressions which may be made on his own mind. But, on the other hand, there is danger of running into skepticism, and of laying down general princi- ples which may lead us obstinately to contest the truth of the best authenticated facts, and to limit the operations of divine providence. That there have been instances of persons having had presentiments as to events which afterwards did happen to themselves and others, there is, I think, the best OPINION OF KNOX. 101 reason to believe. The esprits forts who laugh at vulgar credulity, and exert their ingenuity in accounting for such phenomena on ordinary principles, have been exceedingly puzzled with some of these facts—a great deal more puzzled than they have confessed—and the solutions which they have given, are, in some instances, as mysterious as anything in- cluded in the intervention of inferior spirits, or in preterna- tural and divine intimations.' These passages in the Scotch Reformers and theologians are most important. They show us that the easy mode of whisking away all belief in modern spiritual phenomena, that of accepting it as a fact, in the very teeth of the most enor- mous piles of evidence, that miracles ceased with the apos- tolic age, and had cfone the work of Christian credence for- ever, had been applied to these colossal and logical North British heads, and had failed to impress them. With the natural caution of Scotchmen, they were ready to weigh and examine scrupulously all extraordinary things presented to their attention; but they were not ready to toss to the winds the solemu assurance of the most able and conscientious man, the leader and remodeller of their age, at the request of every shallow skeptic. John Knox, sparing no custom, no preju- dice, no work of man, that he deemed not based in truth or wisdom, who knocked down steeples as he knocked down Popish mummeries, yet spared the facts and intimations that came to him as they had come to the prophets and martyrs before him ; aud he not only boldly assumed inspiration in his own case, but in the case of his predecessor George Wishart and of others. ' Orthodox, orthodox, who believe in John Knox,' says the acute ' Truth-seeker,' ' and all others whom it may concern, lay these words to heart, and ponder them well.' Knox, says Mr. Boys, in his 'Proofs of the Miraculous Faith and Experience of the Church of Christ in all Ages,' delivered predictions so particular in their details, and even regarding particular persons, that they could not be resolved 9* 102 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. upon any principle into mere inferences or sagacious prog- nostications. Of this, Mr. Boys gives various instances, adding that Knox declared that Wishart, Grindal, and other godly men amongst the Reformers, spoke by special revela- tions things that were to happen. He asserted, too, that even that 'blinded prince,' James of Scotland, had certain spiritual visions that 'men of good credit can yet report.' The following passages in Knox's history, also brought for- ward by the ' Truth-seeker,' are extremely striking and im- pressive : ' Whilst George Wishart was so occupied with his God in preaching and meditation, the Cardinal (Beatoun) drew a secret draucht. He caused write unto him a letter, as it had been from his most familiar friend, the Laird of Kinnye, de- siring him with all possible diligence to come unto him, for he was struck with a sudden illness. In the meantime, had the traitor provided three-score men with jackis and spears, to lie in wait within a mile and a half of the town of Mont- rois for his dispatch. The letter coming to his hand he made haste at the first, for the boy had brought a horse, and so with some honest men he passed forth of the town. But suddenly he stayed, and moving a space, returned back; whereat they wondering, he said, " I will not go, / am for- bidden of God, I am assured there is treason. Let some of you go to yon place and tell me what they find." Diligence made, they found the treason as it was ; which being shown with expedition to Mr. George, he remarked, " I know that I shall end my life in that blood-thirsty man's hands ; but it will not be of this manner." ' Subsequently Wishart was apprehended and put to death by the machinations of his enemy, the cardinal, according to his own prophecy. The cardinal was present at the martyr's death, reposing leisurely, with other prelates, on rich cush- ions, laid for their accommodation in the window of a tower, from which the execution might be seen. The following is the account of it from the " Biographia Scotiana : » — " Being WISHART THE MARTYR. 103 raised up from his knees, he was bound to the stake, crving with a loud voice, ' 0 Saviour of the world, have mercy upon me ! Father of Heaven, I commend my spirit into Thy holy hands.' Whereupon the executioner kindled the fire, and the powder that was fastened to his body blew up. The cap- tain of the castle perceiving that he was still alive, drew near, and bade him be of good courage; whereupon Mr. Wishart said, 'This flame hath reached my body, yet it hath not daunted my spirit; but he who from yonder place beholdeth me with such pride, shall within a few days lie in the same as ignominiously as he is now seen proudly to rest himself.'" 'A few weeks after this the castle was surprised, and the cardinal put to death, and his body was suspended from the window whence he had witnessed the martyrdom of Wishart, whose prediction was thus fulfilled.' Thus the chief heads of Protestantism abroad, and even in Scotland, though protesting against the corruptions and the abuse of the doctrine of the supernatural by Rome, seem far from having abandoned their faith in it, and were still found exercising the spirit of prophecy, the spirit of exor- cism, and receiving continued inspiration from the Divine Head of the Christian Church. 104 niSTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. CHAPTER VI. THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. A certain class adhere firmly to the articles of faith of the Protestant Church, and while they believe all the appearances ' from the invisible world which are related in the Bible, reject everything of this nature subsequent to the times of the Apos- tles; and when undeniable facts are adduced, ascribe them to a delusion of Satan and his angels, rather than detract any- thing from their system. Stilung's Pneumatology, Introduction, p. 3. Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint. I am the spirit which still denies. Mephistopheles in Faust. It now appeareth clearly in the light of Christ, that the man of the earth has totally lost his divine instinct, his sensible feeling knowledge of the Deity, as well as that of his own natural humanity; living solely to the vain imagination of his natural reason. Hiel, old German writer. This contempt prior to examination, is an intellectual vice, from which the greatest faculties of mind are not free. I know not, indeed, whether men of the greatest faculties are not the most subject to it. Paley's Evidences, p. 357. FROM what has preceded, it appears that the great actors in the Reformation in all other countries, though pro- testing against the abuses of the doctrine of the supernatural in the church, did not pretend to deny its existence. It remained for the Church of England to take this step in opposition to the universal evidence and practice of man in all countries and all time. It assumed the character which Goethe has conferred on Mephistopheles, that of the spirit which forever denies. It was a deed as opposed to all philos- DOCTRINES OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 105 ophy as to all history. To destroy the faith in the perpetual and sensible intercourse of spirit with spirit, whether in the body or out of the body, was to give the lie to a host of great and good men through fifteen hundred years; to un- dermine all historic credit, and to enthrone that sneering and impotent materialism which has, in consequence, overspread the world, and infected all science, all sentiment, all religion, with dry rot of the soul, from which the pulpit cannot free itself any more than the mere scientific chair. We do won- ders in material discovery; we do none in psychology, be- cause we hardly believe in -soul at all. We hear in sermons sounding phrases about the operations of the Divine Spirit, and we hear still, in the Homilies of the Church of Eng- land, such words as these at Whitsuntide : —' The Holy Ghost doth always declare Himself, by His fruitful and gracious gifts — namely, by the word of wisdom, by the word of knowledge, which is the understanding of the Scriptures ; by faith in doing of miracles, by healing them that are dis- eased, by prophecy, which is the distribution of God's mys- teries ; by discerning of spirits, diversities of tongues, and so forth. All which gifts, as they proceed from one Spirit, and are severally given to man according to the measurable distribution of the Holy Ghost; even so do they bring men, and not without good cause, into a wonderful admiration of God's power.' Similar avowals are made in the second part of this Homily, and in the Homily for Rogation Sunday. In the early copies of the unabridged Prayer-book, previous to 1721, still more distinct recognition of miraculous gifts is found. Such words, indeed, are to be found in that book; but when do we see them realized ? when do they bring us to this wonderful admiration of God's power 1 How long is it since these miracles were done by the church which pro- fesses belief in them in its Book of Common Prayer ? How long since the gifts of healing were exercised apostolically by its ministers ? How long since they cast out evil spirits ? 106 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. How long since they prophesied as a function of the Chris- tian faith, or practised the discernment of spirits ? Never as a church, in most of these departments, since it was a church. How, then, is this ? All other branches of the Christian faith, save Protestantism, have ever done, and still do, profess to believe and practise these gifts of the Holy Spirit, but the Church of England ; and the same deadness has passed by prestige and contact on to the Dissenters, has had a spiritual creed, but no spiritual practice, since it as- sumed the position of a church. Hence it is that the Catho- lics have ever declared that the Protestant faith is no true faith ; for it is destitute of God's great criterion, the existence of miracle in it. Hence the Catholics have always declared that Protestantism 'is but a slippery highway to Deism,' and Protestautism has but too fully proved the truth of the accu- sation. Look up ! cast your eyes abroad over Protestantism, and behold the swarms of rationalists who believe little, and of materialists who believe nothing 1 See clergymen, who read the Homilies about miracles and healing of sickness by lay- ing on of apostolic hands, and who write in 'Essays and Reviews,' to assure you that they think all this nonsense, and impossible from the fixed natural order of things. Ask the most believing of clergymen when they have been reading such words, as soon as they have got outside their church- doors, if they believe them, and they will smile at your sim- plicity. What then ? Is this a solemn national hoax ? Must we apply to Anglicism the epithet of a stately and expensive sham ? And yet between the non-belief in actual and prac- tical supernatural life in the church, and this harsh phrase- ology, where is the refuge ? Look abroad still, over millions of Protestants, Church and Dissenting, who have weekly drawn their spiritual pabu- lum from the dry spiritual larders of these pulpits ; — are they alive, or are they walking automata of dead morals and deader faith ? If they believe in the existence of miracles, DOCTRINES OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 107 and the discerning of spirits, and the healing of sickness by spiritual means, and the revelations of spiritual messages from the sacred dead, why do they persecute or sneer at those whose vital faith and creed this is? Look onward still, and behold the learned professors of arts and sciences with their souls all shrivelled up by the exsiccating process of this Anglican drying-house, and whose looks and words are of the purest dryasdust order, capites-mortuum men — of the earth, earthy. Yet all, or many of these men, pro- fess to belief in the Gospel, and in the Homilies of the church, and think themselves cognizant of the requirements of logic, and yet declare positively in the world their disbe- lief of doctrines out of the hour of church-service which they solemnly assert in it. Such are the fungus-growths of sys- tems which assert and deny alternately on Sundays and on week-days. But in this depth of inconsistency there is yet a lower depth. The English Church retains, in its formulas of wor- ship, sundry traces of the Gospel truth of miracle ; but its bishops have systematically disclaimed the creed they were appointed to teach, and some of them, to whom I shall im- mediately come, have written against all miracle since the days of the apostles with a zeal and a success which have done marvels of spiritual desolation, and have forged the most trenchant weapons of the unbeliever. From the very earliest days of the Anglican Church its great dignitaries and great theological writers have taken up the maxim that all miracles have ceased; and they have followed one another in this parrot-rote with a most wonderful and most infidel fidelity. And in saying this, let me add, that it is uttered in no spirit of hostility to these prelates and other writers. They were men profoundly sincere in their views; many of them great and good men ; men ready to lay down their lives for their faith, and some of whom did lay down their lives for it. Their error on this head was, therefore, the more to be lamented; and, in speaking of such men and 108 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. doctrines, the plainness of our words must be excused for the sacred interests of truth. Archbishop Cranmer, at the very foundation of the English Reformed Church, took up the cry of the non-neces- sity of farther miracle. ' Some there be, now-a-days, that ask why men work no miracles now ? ' And he answers, ' If thou be faithful, as thou oughtest to be ; if thou love Christ as He should be loved, thou needest no miracles, for signs are given to unbelievers, and not to the faithful.' But we say precisely so; and why are not signs, then, given to unbelievers ? Christ gave them to the unbelievers of His time, and so made believers of them. He was not sent, He said, to those who were whole, but to those who were sick; and the sick of these days, the unbelievers, ask for signs, and why shall they not get them, as the unbelievers of old did ? Is God a respecter of persons ? But Cranmer was not yet so thoroughly hardened into the non-miracle creed as his followers. He had full faith in miracles worked by the devil. He quotes a great deal from the Fathers — Lactantius, Chrysostom, Cyril, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Augustine, Jerome, Scapulensis, &c. — to show what they did amongst them and amongst the heathen, in the oracles, and in per- forming many wonders. Ghosts also, he says, appeared; out that he thinks, with Chrysostom, that the devil's innu- merable deceits brought so much fraud into the life of man that, for that cause, God hath shut up the way; ' neither doth He suffer any of the dead to come again hither, to tell what is done there, lest by that means he should bring in aft his wiles and subtelties' ('Unwritten Verities,' vol. iv. of Cran- mer's Works, p. 203). Accordingly, he says, when you hear a dead man's soul cry, 'I am the soul of such an one,'you are not to believe it the soul of that man, but of a devil. He does not, however, tell us why God should allow the devil to deceive us, when ghosts are not allowed to do it. He afterwards relaxes a little, and after giving us some 'sham ' Popish miracles, gives BELIEF OF LATIMER. 109 ns what he believes to be 'real.' A strange thing it is to hear of the wonderful trances and visions of Mistress Ann Wentworth, of Suffolk, ' which told many men the secrets of their hearts, which they thought no man could have told them, but God only. She cut stomachers in pieces, and made them whole again, and caused divers men who spoke against her delusions, to go stark mad. All which things were proved, and openly by her confessed to be done by necro- mancy and the deceit of the devil.' From all this it would appear that Cranmer thought that God had ceased to work miracles to convince and save men, but that he allowed the devil to work them to deceive and destroy men. Yet, like others of our old divines, he must have had better notions when he got out of his ecclesiastical dogmas; for in a letter written from Austria to Henry VIII., he speaks of having seen a great blazing star, called cometa. This was in October, 1532. Others, he says, report having seen other strange phenomena, but he had only seen the 'cometa;' and he adds, that 'God knows what these tokens foretell, for they do not lightly appear, but against some great mutation.' So that, after all, he did believe in God sending wonderful tokens, which is but another phrase for believing in miracles. Cranmer's contemporary, that good, simple-hearted, honest- souled Bishop Latimer, at whose name every heart kindles with a glow of warm affection, what a beautifully and quaintly consistent inconsistent old patriarch he was 1 He had got his non-miracle theory as glibly as Cranmer, and held it with the same charming inconsequence. 'And peradventure some one will say, " How happeneth it that there are no miracles done in these days, by such as are preachers of the word of God ? " I answer, the word of God is already confirmed by miracles : partly by Christ himself, and partly by the apostles and saints. Therefore they which now preach the same word need no miracles for the confirmation thereof; for the same is sufficiently confirmed already' (vol. i. 161). II. —10 110 niSTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. Thus, these two great founders of the Reformed Church of England, because the Papists taunted them with having no miracles, and being therefore a mere heretical schism, in- stead of seeking to the Divine Founder of Christianity to confirm to them His favor of miraculous powers, adopted the convenient but deadly theory, that miracles had ceased. It would have been in vain to have asked them exactly when they ceased, or where was the authority of the Gospels for their ceasing at all; they had got their easy-going-answer, and you find most of the old divines repeating it. But what is most singular, and what they do not appear to have seen, is, that most of them, at the same time that they held this theo- retic notion, held the practical one of believing in miraculous interferences on their own behalf. The proceeding was in- consistent, but their private experience was much nearer the truth than their public or ecclesiastical creed. Let us, there- fore, turn to Latimer's life. His biographer says : ' During the reign of Edward VI. God not only gave unto him plenteously of His Spirit, but also by the same Spirit he did most ardently prophesy of all those kinds of plagues which afterwards ensued ; so plainly, that if England ever had a prophet, he might seem to be one ' (p. xxi.). Thus, according to his biographer, he was miraculously endowed at the moment that he was denying miracles. He adds, that he always prophesied his own death by martyrdom. In his ser- mons the good bishop is continually quoting miracles, and he dwells with great gusto on the fact that the Jews were driven away by arms by the Emperor Hadrian, when, in defiance of prophecy, they assembled from all countries to reseat them- selves at Jerusalem. He quotes, at length, and comments zealously on the miraculous dispersion of the Jews again by fire and earthquake, when Julian the Apostate had summoned them to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. He was fond of introducing stories in his sermons of the personal appearances of the devil. On one occasion he slapped a man in the face for not having bowed at the name of Jesus, saying, if Christ ASSERTIONS OF HOOKER. Ill had taken upon Him the nature of devils as He had done that of man, they would have revered Him more than men do. On another occasion he related this anecdote : — ' The devil came to take a German's soul on its departing from the body, and, pulling out a book, began to make a catalogue of his sins, commanding the sick man to confess them ; but the man replied that God had promised that, if his sins were as scar- let, He would make them white as snow. The devil passed that over, and bade him go on. On this the man said, that " the Son of God appeared that He might destroy the works of the devil," and at this the devil vanished, and the soul of the man escaped to God.' It is clear that honest Latimer's creed about miracles was a new one, and that he altogether forgot it when he became warm in his sermons, or praised God in his private life for His miraculous interference on man's behalf. The Judicious Hooker was more judicious than these two noble old martyrs in his creed, and more scriptural. His colossal mind could not be wrapped up in the new cob- webs of the new Protestant theory about miracles. He admits the permanent continuance of their working in Christ's church. ' Men may be extraordinarily, yet allowably, two ways admitted with spiritual functions in the church. One is, when God Himself doth of Himself raise up any whose labor He useth without requiring that man should authorize them ; but then ne doth ratify their calling by manifest signs and tokens Himself from heaven ; and thus, such even as believed not our Saviour's teaching, do yet acknowledge Him a lawful teacher sent from God. " Thou art a teacher sent from God, otherwise none could do those things which thou doest" (John iii. 2). Luther did but reasonably, there- fore, in declaring that the Senate of Miillhouse should do well to ask of Muncer, from whence he received power to teach, who it was that had called him ; and, if his answer were that God had given him his charge, then to require, at his hands, some evident sign thereof for man's satisfaction, 112 HISTORY OF THE SUPERNATURAL. because so God is wont, when He Himself is the author of any extraordinary calling.' ('Ecclesiastical Polity,' iii. 23.) Speaking of St. Augustine's saying, that ' such gifts were not permitted to last always lest men should grow cold with their commonness,' he contends that the words of Augustine, declaring that the vulgar use of those miracles was then expired, are no prejudice to the like extraordinary graces more rarely observed in some, either then or of later times' (ii. 340). He says, ' The angels resemble God in their unweariable and even insatiable longing to do all manner of good to men by all means.' ' The paynims,' he says, 'had arrived at the same knowledge of the nature of angels ; Orpheus confess- ing that the fiery throne of God is surrounded by those most industrious angels, careful how all things are performed amongst men.' £