pride, and do irreparable injury to health of mind and body.[27]

It hardly falls within my task to attempt to determine what these
visions really are. The subject is one upon which psychological and
medical science may some day throw more light. But this much I must
say, to make my own position clear: I regard these experiences as
neither more nor less "supernatural" than other mental phenomena. Many
of them are certainly pathological;[28] about others we may feel
doubts; but some have every right to be considered as real
irradiations of the soul from the light that "for ever shines," real
notes of the harmony that "is in immortal souls." In illustration of
this, we may appeal to three places in the Bible where revelations of
the profoundest truths concerning the nature and counsels of God are
recorded to have been made during ecstatic visions. Moses at Mount
Horeb heard, during the vision of the burning bush, a proclamation of
God as the "I am"--the Eternal who is exalted above time. Isaiah, in
the words "Holy, Holy, Holy," perceived dimly the mystery of the
Trinity. And St. Peter, in the vision of the sheet, learned that God
is no respecter of persons or of nationalities. In such cases the
highest intuitions or revelations, which the soul can in its best
moments just receive, but cannot yet grasp or account for, make a
language for themselves, as it were, and claim the sanction of
external authority, until the mind is elevated so far as to feel the
authority not less Divine, but no longer external. We may find fairly
close analogies in other forms of that "Divine madness," which Plato
says is "the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men"--such as
the rapture of the poet, or (as Plato adds) of the lover.[29] And
even the philosopher or man of science may be surprised into some such
state by a sudden realisation of the sublimity of his subject. So at
least Lacordaire believed when he wrote, "All at once, as if by
chance, the hair stands up, the breath is caught, the skin contracts,
and a cold sword pierces to the very soul. It is the sublime which has
manifested itself![30]" Even in cases where there is evident
hallucination, e.g. when the visionary sees an angel or devil sitting
on his book, or feels an arrow thrust into his heart, there need be no
insanity. In periods when it is commonly believed that such things may
and do happen, the imagination, instead of being corrected by
experience, is misled by it. Th