slead men, and carry them on to every excess of irregularity, error,
and impiety; and that he may also permit him to perform some things
which to us appear astonishing, and even miraculous; whether the devil
achieves them by natural power, or by the supernatural concurrence of
God, who employs the evil spirit to punish his creature, who has
willingly forsaken Him to yield himself up to his enemy. The prophet
Ezekiel was transported through the air from Chaldea, where he was a
captive, to Judea, and into the temple of the Lord, where he saw the
abominations which the Israelites committed in that holy place; and
thence he was brought back again to Chaldea by the ministration of
angels, as we shall relate in another chapter.

We know by the Gospel that the devil carried our Saviour to the
highest point of the temple at Jerusalem.[225] We know also that the
prophet Habakkuk[226] was transported from Judea to Babylon, to carry
food to Daniel in the lion's den. St. Paul informs us that he was
carried up to the third heaven, and that he heard ineffable things;
but he owns that he does not know whether it was in the body or only
in the spirit. He therefore doubted not the possibility of a man's
being transported in body and soul through the air. The deacon St.
Philip was transported from the road from Gaza to Azotus in a very
little time by the Spirit of God.[227] We learn by ecclesiastical
history, that Simon the magician was carried by the demon up into the
air, whence he was precipitated, through the prayers of St. Peter.
John the Deacon,[228] author of the life of St. Gregory the Great,
relates that one Farold having introduced into the monastery of St.
Andrew, at Rome, some women who led disorderly lives, in order to
divert himself there with them, and offer insult to the monks, that
same night Farold having occasion to go out, was suddenly seized and
carried up into the air by demons, who held him there suspended by his
hair, without his being able to open his mouth to utter a cry, till
the hour of matins, when Pope St. Gregory, the founder and protector
of that monastery, appeared to him, reproached him for his profanation
of that holy place, and foretold that he would die within the
year--which did happen.

I have been told by a magistrate, as incapable of being deceived by
illusions as of imposing any such on other people,[229] that on the
16th of October, 1716, a carpenter, who inhabited a village near Bar,
in Alsac