"possession"
went on for several years longer and then gradually died out, though
scattered cases have occurred from that day to this.(394)

(394) Among the many statements of Grandier's case, one of the best in
English may be found in Trollope's Sketches from French History, London,
1878. See also Bazin, Louis XIII.

A few years later we have an even more striking example among the French
Protestants. The Huguenots, who had taken refuge in the mountains of
the Cevennes to escape persecution, being pressed more and more by
the cruelties of Louis XIV, began to show signs of a high degree of
religious exaltation. Assembled as they were for worship in wild and
desert places, an epidemic broke out among them, ascribed by them to
the Almighty, but by their opponents to Satan. Men, women, and children
preached and prophesied. Large assemblies were seized with trembling.
Some underwent the most terrible tortures without showing any signs of
suffering. Marshal de Villiers, who was sent against them, declared that
he saw a town in which all the women and girls, without exception,
were possessed of the devil, and ran leaping and screaming through the
streets. Cases like this, inexplicable to the science of the time, gave
renewed strength to the theological view.(395)

(395) See Bersot, Mesmer et la Magnetisme animal, third edition, Paris,
1864, pp. 95 et seq.

Toward the end of the same century similar manifestations began to
appear on a large scale in America.

The life of the early colonists in New England was such as to give
rapid growth to the germs of the doctrine of possession brought from
the mother country. Surrounded by the dark pine forests; having as their
neighbours Indians, who were more than suspected of being children of
Satan; harassed by wild beasts apparently sent by the powers of evil
to torment the elect; with no varied literature to while away the
long winter evenings; with few amusements save neighbourhood quarrels;
dwelling intently on every text of Scripture which supported their
gloomy theology, and adopting its most literal interpretation, it is not
strange that they rapidly developed ideas regarding the darker side of
nature.(396)

(396) For the idea that America before the Pilgims had been especially
given over to Satan, see the literature of the early Puritan period,
and especially the poetry of Wigglesworth, treated in Tylor's History of
American Literature, vol. ii,