aware of the delusion. No man can submit to long-continued and rigorous
fasting without becoming the subject of these hallucinations; and the
more he enfeebles his organs of sense, the more vivid is the exhibition,
the more profound the deception. An ominous sentence may perhaps be
incessantly whispered in his ear; to his fixed and fascinated eye some
grotesque or abominable object may perpetually present itself. To the
hermit, in the solitude of his cell, there doubtless often did appear,
by the uncertain light of his lamp, obscene shadows of diabolical
import; doubtless there was many an agony with fiends, many a struggle
with monsters, satyrs, and imps, many an earnest, solemn, and manful
controversy with Satan himself, who sometimes came as an aged man,
sometimes with a countenance of horrible intelligence, and sometimes as
a female fearfully beautiful. St. Jerome, who, with the utmost
difficulty, had succeeded in extinguishing all carnal desires,
ingenuously confesses how sorely he was tried by this last device of the
enemy, how nearly the ancient flames were rekindled. As to the reality
of these apparitions, why should a hermit be led to suspect that they
arose from the natural working of his own brain? Men never dream that
they are dreaming. To him they were terrible realities; to us they
should be the proofs of insanity, not of imposture.

[Sidenote: Delusions created by the mind.]

If, in the prison discipline of modern times, it has been found that
solitary confinement is a punishment too dreadful for the most hardened
convict to bear, and that, if persisted in, it is liable to lead to
insanity, how much more quickly must that unfortunate condition have
been induced when the trials of religious distress and the physical
enfeeblement arising from rigorous fastings and incessant watchings were
added? To the dreadful ennui which precedes that state, one of the
ancient monks pathetically alludes when he relates how often he went
forth and returned to his cell, and gazed on the sun as if he hastened
too slowly to his setting. And yet such fearful solitude is of but brief
duration. Even though we flee to the desert we cannot be long alone. Cut
off from social converse, the mind of man engenders companions for
itself--companions like the gloom from which they have emerged. It was
thus that to St. Anthony appeared the Spirit of Fornication, under the
form of a lascivious negro boy; it was thus that multitudes of daem