here of an English churchman's common sense, most
unhappily a strong breath of _French fanaticism_ suddenly set across his
path, from quite another quarter. And the singular phenomenon now
presented itself of an epidemic religious-hysteria commingling with, and
emphasizing into lamentable extravagance, all the most dangerous
features of the Methodist-Moravian doctrine about the new birth. So
wonderfully is all the world connected together! * * * * *

These French "convulsionists," who had, just before this time, brought
their curious mental malady with them into England, were refugees from
the atrocious _dragonnades_ of Louis the XIV. Maddened by his abominable
and relentless persecutions, deprived by his autocratic edicts of all
that life held dear, robbed of their children at the sweet age of seven
years old, broken on the wheel, hunted among the mountains of the
Cevennes, beggared, insulted, tortured, massacred--what wonder that
these poor Protestants lost the balance of their mental powers and
engendered a hysterical disease? The disease is (I believe), under its
strangely mutable forms, well known to medical science, though science
has never yet been able to probe all its mysterious depths. Its seat is,
apparently, the great nervous ganglia of nutrition, which lie in the
center of the body, and whose strange sympathetic action with and upon
the brain has led to all the popular notions about the heart and
neighboring organs being the seat of various impassioned feelings.
Suffice it, however, at present, to observe that the phenomena which
this extraordinary and infectious disease presented had sufficed to
cheer the faith and animate the ardor of the Calvinists in the Cevennes
against Rome.

The Cevennes is a range of mountains in the south of France, divided
into N. and S. * * a wild rugged country, and the abode of many
Protestants, who here maintained themselves against the persecutions of
their enemies. (See _Cavalier Jean_). Such, in fact, were the causes of
the extasies or irregular inspirations; the want of spiritual guides and
schools, spoliation, suffering, liability to torture, and constant
apprehension of the galley or the gibbet, the minds of these unfortunate
creatures became excited. * * *

This religious enthusiasm began in Vivarais, an old territory of France,
in Languedoc, on the Rhone, with the dragonnades and the revocation,
repeal of an edict, about the year 1686.

A practical proof of the mor