e philosophers into saints, to write the
"Edifying Life" of Pythagoras or Plotinus, to attribute to them a
legend, virtues of abstinence, contemplation, and supernatural powers,
without which neither credence nor authority were found in that age.

[Footnote 1: Philostratus, _Life of Apollonius_, i. 2, vii. 11, viii.
7; Unapius, _Lives of the Sophists_, pages 454, 500 (edition Didot).]

Preserve us, then, from mutilating history in order to satisfy our
petty susceptibilities! Which of us, pigmies as we are, could do what
the extravagant Francis d'Assisi, or the hysterical saint Theresa, has
done? Let medicine have names to express these grand errors of human
nature; let it maintain that genius is a disease of the brain; let it
see, in a certain delicacy of morality, the commencement of
consumption; let it class enthusiasm and love as nervous
accidents--it matters little. The terms healthy and diseased are
entirely relative. Who would not prefer to be diseased like Pascal,
rather than healthy like the common herd? The narrow ideas which are
spread in our times respecting madness, mislead our historical
judgments in the most serious manner, in questions of this kind. A
state in which a man says things of which he is not conscious, in
which thought is produced without the summons and control of the will,
exposes him to being confined as a lunatic. Formerly this was called
prophecy and inspiration. The most beautiful things in the world are
done in a state of fever; every great creation involves a breach of
equilibrium, a violent state of the being which draws it forth.

We acknowledge, indeed, that Christianity is too complex to have been
the work of a single man. In one sense, entire humanity has
co-operated therein. There is no one so shut in, as not to receive
some influence from without. The history of the human mind is full of
strange coincidences, which cause very remote portions of the human
species, without any communication with each other, to arrive at the
same time at almost identical ideas and imaginations. In the
thirteenth century, the Latins, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Jews, and
the Mussulmans, adopted scholasticism, and very nearly the same
scholasticism from York to Samarcand; in the fourteenth century every
one in Italy, Persia, and India, yielded to the taste for mystical
allegory; in the sixteenth, art was developed in a very similar manner
in Italy, at Mount Athos, and at the court of the Great Mogu