ation,
that they revealed to him things known to himself alone; and after
adducing the admissions above alluded to, and some others, he
adds,--"But it would be superfluous further to multiply testimony in
proof of a fact admitted by all the world, even by the avowed
adversaries of the convulsions, who have found no other method of
explaining it than by doing Satan the honor to proclaim him the author
of these revelations."[37]

Besides these gifts, real or alleged, there was occasionally observed,
during ecstasy, an extraordinary development of the musical faculty.
Montgeron tells us,--"Mademoiselle Dancogne, who, as was well known, had
no voice whatever in her natural state, sings in the most perfect manner
canticles in an unknown tongue, and that to the admiration of all those
who hear her."[38]

As to the general character of these psychological phenomena, the
theologians of that day were, with few exceptions, agreed that they were
of a supernatural character,--the usual question mooted between them
being, whether they were due to a Divine or to a Satanic influence. The
medical opponents of the movement sometimes took the ground that the
state of ecstasy was allied to delirium or insanity,--and that it was a
degraded condition, inasmuch as the patient abandoned the exercise of
his free will: an argument similar to that which has been made in our
day against somewhat analogous phenomena, by a Bostonian.[39]

In concluding a sketch, in which, though it be necessarily a brief one,
I have taken pains to set forth with strict accuracy all the essential
features which mark the character of this extraordinary epidemic, it is
proper I should state that the opponents of Jansenism concur in bringing
against the convulsionists the charge that many of them were not only
ignorant and illiterate girls, but persons of bad character,
occasionally of notoriously immoral habits; nay, that some of them
justified the vicious courses in which they indulged by declaring these
to be a representation of a religious tendency, emblematic of that
degradation through which the Church must pass, before, recalled by the
voice of Elias, it regained its pristine purity.

Montgeron, while admitting that such charges may justly be brought
against some of the convulsionists, denies the general truth of the
allegation, yet after such a fashion that one sees plainly he considers
it necessary, in establishing the character and divine source of the
d