d them to the service of Catholicism. The poor women bore on their
hands and feet wounds, the supposed _spontaneous_ eruption of
delineations of the bleeding wounds of the crucifix, and, on the
forehead, the bloody marks of the crown of thorns. To convict the
imposture, the blood-stains from the wounds in the feet ran _upwards_
towards the toes, to complete a _facsimile_ of the original, though the
poor girls were lying on their backs. The wounds, it is to be hoped, are
inflicted and kept fresh and active by means employed when the victims
are in the insensibility to pain, which commonly goes with trance.

To comprehend the effects of religious excitement operating on masses,
we may inspect three pictures,--the revivals of modern times--the
fanatical delusions of the Cevennes--the behaviour of the
Convulsionnaires at the grave of the Abbe Paris.

"I have seen," says M. Le Roi Sunderland, himself a preacher, [_Zion's
Watchman_, New York, Oct. 2, 1842,] "persons often 'lose their
strength,' as it is called, at camp-meetings, and other places of great
religious excitement; and not pious people alone, but those also who
were not professors of religion. In the spring of 1824, while performing
pastoral labour in Dennis, Massachusetts, I saw more than twenty people
affected in this way. Two young men, of the name of Crowell, came one
day to a prayer meeting. They were quite indifferent. I conversed with
them freely, but they showed no signs of penitence. From the meeting
they went to their shop, (they were shoemakers,) to finish some work
before going to the meeting in the evening. On seating themselves they
were both struck perfectly stiff. I was immediately sent for, and found
them sitting paralysed [he means cataleptic] on their benches, with
their work in their hands, unable to get up, or to move at all. I have
seen scores of persons affected the same way. I have seen persons lie in
this state forty-eight hours. At such times they are unable to converse,
and are sometimes unconscious of what is passing round them. At the same
time they say they are in a happy state of mind."

These persons, it is evident, were thrown in to one of the forms of
trance through their minds being powerfully worked upon; with which
cause the influence of mutual sympathy with what they saw around them,
and perhaps some physical agency, co-operated.

The following extract from the same journal portrays another kind of
nervous seizure, allied to