features the most inexplicable,
is that which prevailed in Paris some hundred and thirty years ago,
among what were called _the Convulsionists of St. Medard_.

The celebrated Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, during his life the opponent
and enemy of the Jesuits, whom he caused to be excluded from the
theological schools of Louvain, left behind him, at his death, a
treatise, posthumously published in 1640, entitled, "Augustinus," in
which he professed to set forth the true opinions of St. Augustine on
those century-long disputed questions of Grace, Free-Will, and
Predestination. Taking ground against the Molinists, he contended for
the doctrine of Predestination antecedent and absolute, a gift purely
gratuitous, of God's free grace, independent of any virtue or merit in
the recipient soul. This doctrine, set forth in five propositions, was
condemned, in the middle of the seventeenth century, by Popes Innocent
X. and Alexander VII.; and against it, when revived by Father Quesnel in
the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was fulminated, in 1713,
by Pope Clement XI., the famous Bull _Unigenitus_.

From this Bull, accepted in France after long opposition, the Jansenist
party appealed to a future Papal Council, thence deriving their name of
_Appellants_. Among these, one of the most noted and zealous was the
Diacre Paris, who refused a curacy, to avoid signing his adhesion to
what he regarded as heresy, consumed his fortune in works of charity,
and his health in austerities of a character so excessive that they
abridged his life. Dying, as his partisans have it, in the odor of
sanctity, and protesting with his last breath against the doctrines of
the obnoxious Bull, his remains were deposited, on the second of May,
1727, in the small church-yard of St. Medard, situated in the twelfth
_arrondissement_ of Paris, on the Rue Mouffetard, not far from the
Jardin des Plantes.

To the tomb of one whom they regarded as a martyr to their cause the
Jansenist Appellants habitually resorted, in all the fervor of religious
zeal, heated to enthusiasm by the persecution of the dominant party. And
there, after a time, phenomena presented themselves, which caused for
years, throughout the French capital and among the theologians of that
age, a fever of excitement; and which, though they have been noticed by
medical and other writers of our own century, have not yet, in my
judgment, attracted, either from the medical profession or from th