of its early days, there sprung up from its holiest | some advantage might have been gained from the mysteries a system of imposture hostile to the pro-antagonism of their errors, and time and reason gress of truth, and not less fatal to the spiritual might have slowly and quietly dislodged them. advancement of man than that which prevailed But they have entered into a fearful covenant, the among heathen nations. Though the instruments consequences of which have neither been foreseen of delusion were changed, the system remained by its friends, nor detected by its enemies. The the same; truth and fable entered in definite pro- centaur of Phreno-Mesmerism has been its monster portions into the legends of the church;-the offspring, and unless some Theseus, with his lying miracles of saints, the incantations of the Lapithæ, shall drive it into exile, Materialism, necromancer, and the presumptuous forgeries of and its kindred heresies, will have a speedy trithe alchymist, deluded the Christian world for umph. many centuries, and in place of having lost their influence they have been embalmed amid the civilization of modern times. Under this system the spiritual element obtained the ascendancy, and powerful and haughty kings laid their willing necks beneath the feet of the bishop of Rome. But in modern Europe the church has become the slave of the state-the sovereign as its spiritual head has usurped the powers of the Roman pontiff, and in retaliation for the wrong, the humblest depositary of episcopal ordination lays claim to a supernatural influence which neither his guilt nor his ignorance can paralyze. The priest of lying oracles, who forged the responses of his God, and the clerical charlatan of the middle ages who pretended to rouse the dead from the recesses of the tomb, were less guilty in their imposture than the educated and unregenerated priest of our own day, who attributes to his unclean hands the renovating influence of the baptismal element, or than the godless bishop who pretends to give the Holy Spirit to some blaspheming and unconverted aspirant.

But it is not among ecclesiastical functions only that this love of the supernatural has uprisen with such fearful luxuriance-the pursuits of laymen have been marked with the same extravagances of pretension, and with even a higher demand upon our faith. The Morpheus of the present day, be he the weakest or the wickedest of our race, can distil from his moving fingers the soporific influence, and obtain possession of the mental and corporeal will of his sleeping Alcyone. At his bidding the red current hurries along the stiffened arteries; over the enslaved limbs supervenes the rigor of death; new senses arise; the patient sees where there is no eye, and hears where there is no ear;-nay, he tastes with the palate of his master, moves with his muscles, and thinks with his faculties. Thus have we reproduced the Siamese twins, united, not by a muscular, but by a spiritual ligament. But in this illicit commerce of sensations the magician is subject to an unequal tariff. After he has imparted his tastes and his thoughts to the sleeping partner of the firm, he receives nothing in return; and, so singular is the character of his generosity, that he gives what he does not himself possess, and what he has not even taken from another. The patient discovers the seat and nature of his own diseases, though the sorcerer be no physician; he compounds drugs for their cure, though he be no apothecary; and he predicts future events, though he be no prophet. To these gifts he adds the highest privileges of our suffering nature-an immunity from pain! The executioner might break him on the wheel without the sensation of a strain; and a mesmerized Antonio might give to the Jew his pound of flesh without feeling the inroad upon his skin.

Had such theories stopped here, and occupied merely isolated positions in the intellectual field,

Whatever may be the truth of the theory, it is yet consistent with the soul's immateriality, that the mind, acting through material organs, may exercise higher and lower functions in proportion to the form and magnitude of its instruments, and it is equally consistent with the same cardinal truth, that the senses may be quickened, and impeded functions restored during certain states of sleep; but if it be true that the mechanical pressure of a human finger upon an inch of human cuticle, propagated, it may be, through an inch of subjacent bone, and impressed upon an inch of the mental organ-if it be true that such a pressure can excite emotions of piety, and evoke sentiments of devotion, thus summoning into active exercise the noblest functions of the soul, then is that soul but an aggregate of dust-a solid of kneaded clay, which shall die at man's death, and crumble at his decay.

In a country where wonders like these are exhibited to enlightened audiences, and received with faith even by the most sceptical, it may not be uninstructive to take a rapid view of the Occult Sciences of ancient times-to survey the apparently miraculous in nature, and the seemingly supernatural in art to separate the prodigies which science and ocular evidence have established, from the phantoms which ignorance has created—and to impress upon the young or the unsettled mind the irrefragable truth, that if among the arrangements of the physical world, and under the laws by which Providence directs man's sublunary concerns, there are phenomena and results which transcend our faith and our intelligence, there must be also in the coëxisting spiritual world, which is to survive our preparatory state, events and laws which, though they transcend human reason, may yet be established by human testimony, and which, though foolishness to the wise, are yet wisdom to the simple.

After pointing out, in his first chapter, the interest which attaches to the mysteries and magic of the ancients, M. Salverte directs our attention to the motives which give credibility to miraculous recitals. These motives he finds in the number and accordance of the recitals themselves, and in the confidence which we can place in the observers and witnesses, and likewise in the possibility of eliminating what is marvellous by discovering the principal causes which give to a natural fact a supernatural character; and, in the discussion of these topics, instead of exhibiting any sceptical tendency, he evinces an extent of faith which some of our readers may regard as bordering even on the credulous.

"Wherever," says he, "a religious revelation does not overpower the judgment, what motives of credibility can make a judicious mind admit the existence of prodigies or magical works? The doctrine of probabilities will serve for our guide. That a man is deceived by appearances more or less specious, or that he seeks to deceive us if he

has an interest in doing it, is much more probable centre, with a hole which would admit the little than the accuracy of a recital which involves in it finger. Wherever the hail had fallen there were anything marvellous. But if at different times found, when it had melted, many similar stones and in different places several men have seen the hitherto unknown in the commune of Grignonsame thing or things similar, and if their recitals court. In a procès-verbal, addressed to the subare numerous and accordant with each other, their prefect of Neufchateau, M. Jacoutot mentions this improbability diminishes, and may ultimately dis- extraordinary phenomenon, and on the 26th Sepappear. Is it credible that, in the year 197 of tember he himself gave to two other persons and our era, a shower of quicksilver* fell at Rome in to myself the above details, which he offered to the Forum of Augustus? Dion Cassius did not have attested by all the inhabitants of the comsee it fall, but he saw it immediately after it fell. mune, and which M. Garnier, Curé of Chatillon He collected drops of it, and by rubbing them on sur Saone and Grignoncourt, spontaneously cona piece of copper, he gave it the appearance of firmed to me. silver, which, he says, it retained three whole "On the banks of the Ognon, a river which runs days. Notwithstanding his positive testimony, at the distance of ten or twelve leagues from and notwithstanding the tradition reported by Grignoncourt, there is seen a great quantity of Glycas, according to which the same event took stones similar to those which have been mentioned, place in the reign of Aurelian, this wonder is too and equally perforated in the middle. Were they strange to be admitted in the present day. Must also the product of hail charged with aerolites?" we therefore absolutely reject it? The impos--Tom. ii., p. 14, 15, Note.

sible, says one, is never probable-surely not; Now, this story of a shower of transparent cofbut can we assign the limits of the possible; let fee-colored stones, embosomed in hail, which is us examine-let us doubt-but let us not hasten given as an example of an undoubted modern to deny. At the beginning of the nineteenth cen- prodigy, is defective in that very condition which tury, the most distinguished of the French Savans, M. Salverte considers necessary to command a few days after they had rejected, with some our assent. The phenomenon was never seen severity, an account of a shower of aerolites, (mete- in any other place, and by any other persons, oric stones,) were compelled not only to acknowl- and the enveloped stone was not a substance, like edge the existence but the frequent occurrence quicksilver, known to have a separate existence. of this phenomenon. If a prodigy similar to that A meteoric stone might be projected from the witnessed by Dion, had been reported at different moon, however unlikely such a supposition is, or epochs by different writers, and if it had occurred might be a fragment of a broken planet, or it might in our own day, and had been seen by skilful observers, it would no longer have been a fablean illusion, but a phenomenon which, like the fall of aerolites, would take its place in the annals where science consigns facts which it has found to be certain, without pretending to explain them.

"With what disdain, with what ridicule and contempt would we have spurned any ancient author who informed us 'that a woman had a breast in her left thigh with which she suckled her own child and several others.' This phenomenon was actually maintained to be true by the Academy of Sciences at Paris (at the sitting of the 5th June, 1827.) In order to place the fact beyond a doubt, we require only to know the accuracy of the philosopher who observed it, and the strength of the testimonies by which his veracity is confirmed."-Tom. i., p. 11-15.

In support of the sentiment contained in the preceding extract, that we ought to be cautious in denying the prodigies recorded by the ancients, M. Salverte describes a prodigy in our own day, to which he himself bears a secondary testimony, and which, he avers, would have been treated as a fable had it been related by any ancient author.

be an aggregate of mineral elements, which we know exist in the atmosphere; but a great quantity of circular perforated discs of a polished and transparent mineral, could only have come from a jeweller's shop in the moon, consigned to another jeweller in the atmosphere, who set them in ice for the benefit of the Maire of Grignoncourt. If such quantities of so rare and curious a body not only fell in France, but were gathered on the banks of the Ognon, why did not M. Jacoutot show a single specimen to M. Salverte in 1826, and why do we not find specimens in the different museums in the capital cities of Europe? No mineralogist has described the stone-no chemist has analyzed it, and no devotee has worshipped it.

66

In the preceding extract, M. Salverte has embodied Mr. Hume's celebrated argument against miracles, which has so long been the mainstay of the sceptic and the infidel; but though he has himself successfully replied to it, yet he has withdrawn from the benefit of his reply those prodigies and miracles which are witnessed by persons whose judgments are influenced by a religious revelation," and consequently the miracles of the New Testament. For this exclusion he has "On the 27th May, 1819, at four o'clock in the assigned no reason whatever, and it becomes evening, the commune of Grignoncourt, in the necessary to remove any erroneous impression arrondissement of Neufchateau, and department which it may have made upon the reader. of the Vosges, was desolated by an enormous hail. When we balance the probability that human M. Jacoutot, then and at present (1829) Maire of testimony may err, against the probability that the this commune, collected and melted several hail-operations of nature will continue in their ordinary stones, weighing nearly half a kilogramme (up-course, we assume an uniformity in these operawards of 1 lb. avoird.) He found in the centre tions of which we have no clear proof, and a falliof each a transparent stone of the color of coffee, and from 14 to 18 millimètres thick (from 6 to 8 tenths of an inch!) larger than a piece of two francs, flat, round, polished, and perforated in the

bility in human testimony which does not universally characterize it. But if there be such an uniformity in the course of nature, and a continuity in her laws, the laws which govern our moral being are no less uniform. That man is often deceived, and is himself as often a deceiver, is a truth too general to be questioned; but it is just as probable, that the earth will stand still, and day and night

cease, as that a number of simple and intelligent | of Mount Ida, which every year ran with blood in men will concur in giving false witness when their commemoration of the death of Memnon, who fell interests and their happiness would be promoted in single combat with Achilles, is an example of by withholding it. In discussing a question of this species of illusion. This fragment of Grecian this kind, we must take the case of a sober and fable originated in the more ancient tradition, that enlightened inquirer, who is called upon to believe the river Adonis, which had its source in Mount a supernatural event upon the testimony of wit- Lebanon, was colored annually with the blood of nesses with whose character he is acquainted. the unfortunate youth who perished by the mortal Such an individual, however learned, can have no bite of the wild boar which he pursued. An invery overpowering conviction of the uniform habitant of Byblos observed, that the soil watered course of nature. Whatever be its extent, it by the river, was composed of a red earth, which must be founded chiefly on his own limited obser- being dried by the heat, was carried by the wind vation. For anything he can understand, the into the river, and thus communicated to it the earth, or any other planet, may stand still periodi- color of blood. Among the poetical fictions of cally, to keep its motions in harmony with the rest Greece, was the transformation into a rock, near of the system; and for anything he knows, such the island of Corfu, of the Phoenician vessel which an event may have often taken place. Various brought back Ulysses into Thrace. Pliny menfacts which history records, and events, perhaps tions, that a rock in that locality actually had the within his own knowledge, may concur in giving appearance of a vessel in full sail, and a modern some degree of probability to the occurrence of traveller has described this curious resemblance.* such interruptions of the course of nature. The In illustration of this class of illusory phenomena, Aurora Borealis, for example, seems to have pre- to which the character of the marvellous has been sented itself to man for the first time within the given, M. Salverte refers to those impressions on last 200 years. The masses of meteoric iron in the surface of rocks, which so frequently resemble Siberia and in Brazil, must have fallen from the the tracks of living beings. The foot of Budda is sky since the formation of the soil on which they imprinted on Adam's rock in Ceylon, and the imrest; and in our own day we have seen pestilence press of Gaudma's foot is revered among the Birtracking its desolating course over the world, and mans. Dr. John Davy conjectures that the one is in lines where neither soil nor climate seem to a work of art, and Colonel Sym regards the other have drawn it, as if it were a catastrophe in which as resembling more a hieroglyphic tablet than a second causes were either inoperative or concealed natural phenomenon. The Mussulmans exhibit from our view. the impression of Mahomet's head on the walls of a grotto near Medina, and the foot of his camel is sunk in a rock in Palestine. Even in the African desert, in the middle of Soudan, a gigantic impression of the foot of Mahomet's camel, is shown to the traveller. Diodorus Siculus informs us that on a rock near Agrigentum, are to be seen the tracks of the cows which were conducted by Hercules. The legends, however, of Catholic superstition have been more productive than any other, of this species of wonder. The Christian devotee has found on Mount Carmel the mark of the foot of Elias. That of Jesus is repeated four times near his tomb in the vicinity of Nazareth. Near the same village, the Catholic reveres the imprint of the knees of the Virgin Mary, and that of the feet and elbows of our Saviour, and he has even discovered the mark of the last step of the Saviour on earth before his ascension into heaven. Even in modern times, an inhabitant of Charente has recognized upon a rock the impress of the foot of Mary Magdalene † and the prints of human feet, exquisitely natural, both in their form and position, have been found in our own day in the secondary limestone of the Mississippi valley, near St. Louis. In South America, too, similar human footprints, supposed by the Catholics to be those of the apostles, have attracted the attention of geologists.

In the records of human evidence, on the contrary, no examples can be found in which concurrent witnesses persisted in a false testimony, which exposed them to insult and persecution, and finally sealed that testimony with their blood. The sober inquirer after truth, therefore, cannot but regard such a species of evidence as an unerring guide, and by appealing to his own mind-which in a case of this kind must be the safest arbiter-he will find that he could not, under such circumstances, persist in a testimony that was false, and will thus arrive at the same truth which he had deduced from history and observation.

With regard to the limitation which M. Salverte has annexed to the admission of miracles, it does not clearly appear whether the "religious revelation" is supposed to influence the testimony of the witnesses, or the mind of the inquirer. If he means the mind of the inquirer, as the phrase of influencing the judgment might lead us to infer, then the limitation is unnecessary, as no person already convinced of the truth of the revelation, and overpowered by its grandeur, would ever think of inquiring farther into its evidence. If he means the testimony of the witnesses, then it is manifest that the ocular evidence of a believing witness, is, in the abstract, equally good with that of a sceptic, and that evidence, too, is corroborated by the consideration, that a witness who is to regulate his conduct by the truths to which he testifies, and on its account to expose himself to obloquy, if not to exile or martyrdom, will exercise, in the examination of it, a double cau

tion.

These various statements, with the exception of the two last, have been adduced by M. Salverte as examples of the influence of the imagination, in seeing the likeness of familiar objects in forms accidentally produced, and he does not seem to be aware of the remarkable discoveries of the footsteps of animals on solid rocks, which now form some of the most interesting data in geological

In his third chapter, M. Salverte proceeds to enumerate and discuss the principal causes which give to a common fact a supernatural character. The simplest of these causes he finds in the illusory appearances of the works of nature themselves, which the imagination of the observer transforms into realities. The river in the valley | vii., p. 42.

* Bibliothèque Universelle, Literature, tom. ii., p. 195, June, 1816.

+ Mém. de la Société des Antiquaires de France, tom.