are capable of
being resolved into cataleptic trance, a state not unlike that
produced by mesmerism, and in which many of the same phenomena seem
naturally to display themselves; the well-known instance of the young
servant girl, related by Coleridge, who, though ignorant and uneducated,
could during her sleep-walking discourse learnedly in rabbinical
Hebrew, would furnish a case in point. The circumstance of her old
master having been in the habit of walking about the house at night,
reading from rabbinical books aloud and in a declamatory manner; the
impression made by the strange sounds upon her youthful imagination;
their accurate retention by a memory, which, however, could only
reproduce them in an abnormal condition--all teach us many most
interesting psychological facts, which, had this young girl fallen
into other hands, would have been useless in a philosophical point of
view, and would have been only used to establish the doctrine of
diabolical possession and ecclesiastical exorcism. We should have been
told how skilled was the fallen angel in rabbinical traditions, and
how wholesome a terror he entertained of the Jesuits, the Capuchins,
or the _Fratres Minimi_, as the case might be. Not a few of the most
remarkable cases of supposed _modern_ possession are to be accounted
for by involuntary or natural mesmerism. Indeed the same view seems to
be taken by a popular minister of the church (Mr. Mac Niel), in our
own day, viz., that mesmerism and diabolical possession are frequently
identical. Our difference with him is that we should consider the
cases called by the two names as all natural, and he would consider
them as all supernatural. And here, to avoid misconception, or rather
misinterpretation, let me at once observe, that I speak thus of
_modern_ and _recorded_ cases only, accepting _literally_ all related
in the New Testament, and not presuming to say that similar cases
_might_ not occur now. Calmet, however, may be supposed to have
collected all the most remarkable of modern times, and I am compelled
to say I believe not one of them. But when we pass from the evidence
of truth, in which they are so wanting, to the evidence of fraud and
collusion by which many are so characterized, we shall have less wonder
at the general spread of infidelity in times somewhat later, on all
subjects not susceptible of ocular demonstration. Where a system
claimed to be received as a whole, or not at all, it is hardly to b