fter praying, she 'waded the flames' to rescue her children from
the burning parsonage at Epworth. The hypothesis of Iamblichus, when he
writes about the ecstatic or 'possessed' persons who cannot be injured by
fire, is like that of modern spiritualists--the 'spirit' or 'daemon'
preserves them unharmed.

I intentionally omit cases which are vaguely analogous to that of the
Hirpi. In Icelandic sagas, in the Relations of the old Jesuit
missionaries, in the Travels of Pallas and Gmelin, we hear of medicine-
men and Berserks who take liberties with red-hot metal, live coals, and
burning wood. Thus in the Icelandic Flatey Book (vol. i. p. 425) we read
about the fighting evangelist of Iceland, a story of Thangbrandr and the
foreign Berserkir. 'The Berserkir said: "I can walk through the burning
fire with my bare feet." Then a great fire was made, which Thangbrandr
hallowed, and the Berserkir went into it without fear, and burned his
feet'--the Christian spell of Thangbrandr being stronger than the heathen
spell of the Berserkir. What the saga says is not evidence, and some of
the other tales are merely traditional. Others may be explained,
perhaps, by conjuring. The mediaeval ordeal by fire may also be left on
one side. In 1826 Lockhart published a translation of the Church Service
for the Ordeal by Fire, a document given, he says, by Busching in Die
Vorzeit for 1817. The accused communicates before carrying the red-hot
iron bar, or walking on the red-hot ploughshare. The consecrated wafer
is supposed to preserve him from injury, if he be guiltless. He carries
the iron for nine yards, after which his hands are sealed up in a linen
cloth and examined at the end of three days. 'If he be found clear of
scorch or scar, glory to God.' Lockhart calls the service 'one of the
most extraordinary records of the craft, the audacity, and the weakness
of mankind.' {153}

The fraud is more likely to have lain in the pretended failure to find
scorch or scar than in any method of substituting cold for hot iron, or
of preventing the metal from injuring the subject of the ordeal. The
rite did not long satisfy the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages.
It has been discussed by Lingard in his History of England, and by Dr. E.
B. Tylor in Primitive Culture.

For the purpose of the present inquiry I also omit all the rites of
leaping sportfully, and of driving cattle through light fires. Of these
cases, from the Roman Palili