ld have
robbed the ascetic of many an angel's visit; the opening of the
refectory door must many a time have closed the gate of heaven to his
gaze." No one will question the truth of this principle, so long as we
are dealing with uncivilised mankind. Many, however, shrink from
acknowledging that the practices current in more civilised times are
disguised illustrations of the same principle of interpretation, which
descends direct from savages, and but for them would never have existed.

Commenting on the practices of certain savage medicine-men, a missionary
remarks:--

"It always appeared probable to me that these rogues, from long fasting,
contract a weakness of brain, a giddiness, a kind of delirium, which
makes them imagine that they are gifted with superior wisdom, and give
themselves out for physicians. They impose upon themselves first, and
afterwards upon others."[33]

This is shrewdly said, and is a good example of the readiness with which
obvious truths are recognised when they do not clash with religious
prepossessions. The difficulty for others is to discern any real line of
demarcation between the practices of civilised and uncivilised. So far
as one can see, the only real distinction is that the method employed by
savages is open. That followed by civilised people is more or less
disguised. But derangement of function is derangement of function, no
matter how produced. And if we decline to believe that a savage holds
genuine intercourse with a spiritual world, as a consequence of this
derangement, in what way are we justified in accepting the testimony of
a Christian visionary to similar intercourse, when the derangement is in
his case no less clear? It is a case of accepting both, or neither. The
sane and scientific conclusion seems to lie in the following from Dr.
Henry Maudsley:--

"Now that the mental functions are known to be inseparably connected
with nervous substrata, disposed and united in the brain in the most
orderly fashion, superordinate, co-ordinate, and subordinate--the whole
a complex organisation of confederate nerve centres, each capable of
more or less independent action--a natural interpretation presents
itself. The extraordinary states of mental disintegration evince the
separate and irregular function of certain mental nerve tracts, or
grouped nerve tracts with which goes necessarily a coincident
suspension, partial or complete, of the functions of all the rest; the
supernatural