emainder only two were of advanced age; the great
majority were young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five
years.

The public authorities shortly afterward intervened, and sought to
cure the disease and to draw the people out of their mania by singing,
dancing, and sports of various sorts, until at last it was brought under
control.(406)

(406) See Tissot, L'Imagination: ses Bienfaits et ses Egarements sutout
dans le Domaine du Merveilleux, Paris, 1868, liv. iv, ch. vii, S 7:
Les Possedees de Morzine; also Constans, Relation sur une Epidemie de
Hystero-Demonopathies, Paris, 1863.

Scenes similar to these, in their essential character, have arisen more
recently in Protestant countries, but with the difference that what has
been generally attributed by Roman Catholic ecclesiastics to Satan is
attributed by Protestant ecclesiastics to the Almighty. Typical among
the greater exhibitions of this were those which began in the Methodist
chapel at Redruth in Cornwall--convulsions, leaping, jumping, until some
four thousand persons were seized by it. The same thing is seen in the
ruder parts of America at "revivals" and camp meetings. Nor in the
ruder parts of America alone. In June, 1893, at a funeral in the city
of Brooklyn, one of the mourners having fallen into hysterical fits,
several other cases at once appeared in various parts of the church
edifice, and some of the patients were so seriously affected that they
were taken to a hospital.

In still another field these exhibitions are seen, but more after a
medieval pattern: in the Tigretier of Abyssinia we have epidemics of
dancing which seek and obtain miraculous cures.

Reports of similar manifestations are also sent from missionaries
from the west coast of Africa, one of whom sees in some of them the
characteristics of cases of possession mentioned in our Gospels, and is
therefore inclined to attribute them to Satan.(407)

(407) For the cases in Brooklyn, see the New York Tribune of about June
10, 1893. For the Tigretier, with especially interesting citations, see
Hecker, chap. iii, sec. 1. For the cases in western Africa, see the Rev.
J. L. Wilson, Western Africa, p. 217.

III. THEOLOGICAL "RESTATEMENTS."--FINAL TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW
AND METHODS.

But, happily, long before these latter occurrences, science had come
into the field and was gradually diminishing this class of diseases.
Among the earlier workers to