through his knowledge of nature's laws and nature's forces, no answer
from the philosophy of his century and the theology of his priests,
throws himself into the embrace of Mephistopheles. That is human nature.
Exactly the same thing was done in the days of Paul, and exactly the
same thing he himself did. There was the indescribable misery of the
age, and there were the knowledge and theories of that overburdened
century, and no answer, no reply to the questions addressed to heaven
and eternity; and they went to the fountains of mysticism and secret
knowledge to quench the thirst of the soul. There sprung up the
visionary Gnostics among the Gentiles, and the Cabalistic Mystics among
the Jews. History notices the same rotation continually--idealism,
sensualism, scepticism, and finally mysticism.

The mystic art among the Hebrews then was of two different kinds, either
to attract an evil spirit or to be transported alive into paradise or
heaven. An evil spirit was attracted by fasting and remaining for days
and nights alone in burial-grounds, till the brain was maddened and
infatuated, when the artificial demoniac prophesied and performed sundry
miracles. The transportation to heaven or paradise was more difficult.
The candidate for a tour into heaven would retire to some isolated
spot, fast until the brain was maddened with delirium and the nerves
excited to second sight by the loss of sleep. Then, in that state of
trance, he would sit down on the ground, draw up his knees, bend down
his head between them, and murmur magic spells, until, through the
reversed circulation of the blood, the maddened brain, and the unstrung
nerves, he would imagine that he saw the heaven opening to his
inspection, palace after palace thrown widely open to his gaze, hosts of
angels passing within view, until finally he imagined himself entirely
removed from the earth, transported aloft into those diamond palaces on
high, or, as Paul calls it, "caught up into paradise," where he heard
"unspeakable words, which it is not possible for a man to utter," and
the throne of God, with all the seraphim and cherubim, archangels and
angels, became visible and their conversation intelligible to the
enraptured and transported mystic, in a fit of hallucination, when the
bewildered imagination sees objectively its own subjective phantasma,
and hears from without, in supposed articulate sounds, its own silent
thoughts. It requires no great stretch of the imagi