"did scare and
affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful
visions." George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, describes how,
in the middle of winter, when approaching Lichfield, "the Word of the
Lord was like a fire in me," and as he went through the town, "there
seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the
market-place appeared like a pool of blood." Reflecting on the meaning
of the vision, he remembered that, "In the Emperor Diocletian's time a
thousand Christians were martyred at Lichfield. So I was to go without
my shoes through the channel of their blood in the market-place, that I
might raise up the blood of these martyrs which had been shed above a
thousand years before."[59]

In none of these cases could it be fairly claimed that the religious
conviction, as such, was the consequence of the hallucinations
experienced. But it can scarcely be questioned that these served to
strengthen it to an enormous extent. These trances, ecstasies, visions,
were accepted by the subjects as proofs of their 'divine mission,' and
were so accepted by multitudes of their followers. In their absence
religion would most probably have failed to be the fiercely irruptive
force in life that it has been. The religious idea has, so to speak
given hallucination a standing and an authority in life it would not
have possessed in its absence. In the case of men of ordinary capacity
these visions possess little authority. But in the case of men of
extraordinary capacity, men like Luther, Mohammed, Fox, Swedenborg,--who
must in any case have stood superior to their fellows,--these
hallucinations are then under favouring social conditions invested with
enormous authority. And there is no doubt about the fact that religious
leaders have been peculiarly subject to these psychical variations. This
is pointed out by Professor James in the following passage:--

"Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have
been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have
been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a
discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career.
They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas;
and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen
visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily
classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathol