m, and thence to the ground."

Pere de la Menarday, in his _Examen Critique de l'Histoire des Diables de
London_, gives a letter from a missionary priest in Cochin China,
describing a case of demonopathy, in the course of which, if we could
believe the narrator, the patient seemed for a time to have conquered all
the ordinary tendencies of gravitation. The missionary, M. Delacourt,
writing from Paris, 25th November, 1738, begins by protesting his
unwillingness to expose himself to the repulses of public incredulity; but
for his friends' sake consents to give the particulars. "Voici donc le
fait dans ses principales circonstances _tel que je l'ai vu de mes propres
yeux_." In the month of May, 1733, a young native communicant, named Dodo,
residing at the town of Cheta, in the province of Cham, and kingdom of
Cochin China, being reproached by his conscience for the suppression of
some facts in his confession, fell into violent convulsions on attempting
to take the host in his mouth. He was brought to the missionary, foaming,
leaping, and blaspheming in the manner usual among victims of his malady.
After many exorcisms, both by the missionary and by two other
ecclesiastics, which only increased his sufferings, he was at length, by
gentler entreaties, brought to make a confession. The missionary then
renewed his exorcisms, which he continued for a month with little success.
"At last," says he, "I determined to make a last effort, and to imitate
the example of Monseigneur the Bishop of Tilopolis on a like occasion,
namely, in my exorcism to command the demon in Latin to transport him to
the ceiling of the church, feet up and head down. On the instant his body
became rigid, and as though he were impotent of all his members, he was
dragged from the middle of the church to a column, and there, his feet
joined fast together, his back closely applied to the pillar, without
aiding himself with his hands, he was transported in the twinkling of an
eye to the ceiling, just like a weight run up by a cord, without any
visible agency. While he hung there, with his feet glued to the ceiling,
and his head down, I made the demon, for I had determined to confound and
humiliate him, confess the falsehood of the Pagan religion. I made him
confess that he was a deceiver, and at the same time admit the holiness of
Christianity. I kept him for better than half an hour in the air, and not
possessing enough of constancy to hold him there any longer,