ith the viscera too much heated, are cured by simple and
natural remedies, either by cooling the blood, and creating a
diversion in the humors thereof, or by striking the imagination
through some new device, or by giving so much exercise of body and
mind to those who are afflicted with such maladies of the brain that
they may have something else to do or to think of, than to nourish
such fancies, and strengthen them by reflections daily recurring, and
having always the same end and object.

Footnotes:

[322] Gen. vi. 1, 2.

[323] Athenagorus and Clem. Alex. lib. iii. & v. Strom. & lib. ii.
Pedagog.

[324] Joseph. Antiq. lib. i. c. 4.

[325] Justin. Apolog. utroque.

[326] Vita St. Bernard, tom. i. lib. 20.

[327] Cardan, de Variet. lib. xv. c. lxxx. p. 290.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

RETURN AND APPARITIONS OF SOULS AFTER THE DEATH OF THE BODY, PROVED
FROM SCRIPTURE.

The dogma of the immortality of the soul, and of its existence after
its separation from the body which it once animated, being taken for
indubitable, and Jesus Christ having invincibly established it against
the Sadducees, the return of souls and their apparition to the
living, by the command or permission of God, can no longer appear so
incredible, nor even so difficult.

It was a known and received truth among the Jews in the time of our
Saviour; he assumed it as certain, and never pronounced a word which
could give any one reason to think that he disapproved of, or
condemned it; he only warned us that in common apparitions spirits
have neither flesh nor bones, as he had himself after his
resurrection. If St. Thomas doubted of the reality of the resurrection
of his Master, and the truth of his appearance, it was because he was
aware that those who suppose they see apparitions of spirits are
subject to illusion; and that one strongly prepossessed will often
believe he beholds what he does not see, and hear that which he hears
not; and even had Jesus Christ appeared to his apostles, that would
not prove that he was resuscitated, since a spirit can appear, while
its body is in the tomb and even corrupted or reduced to dust and
ashes.

The apostles doubted not of the possibility of the apparition of
spirits: when they saw the Saviour coming towards them, walking upon
the waves of the Lake of Gennesareth,[328] they at first believed that
it was a phantom.

After St. Peter had left the prison by the aid of an angel, and came
and knocked at