pparently
no other than Mattathias, the father of Judas Maccabaeus,[338] and
four of his sons, who were already dead; there yet remained of his
seven sons but Judas Maccabaeus, Jonathan, and Simon. We may also
understand it as five angels, who were sent by God to the assistance
of the Maccabees. In whatever way we regard it, these are not doubtful
apparitions, both on account of the certainty of the book in which
they are related, and the testimony of a whole army by which they
were seen.

Whence I conclude, that the Hebrews had no doubt that the spirits of
the dead could return to earth, that they did return in fact, and that
they discovered to the living things beyond our natural knowledge.
Moses expressly forbids the Israelites to consult the dead.[339] But
these apparitions did not show themselves in solid and material
bodies; the Saviour assures us of it when he says, "Spirits have
neither flesh nor bones." It was often only an aerial figure which
struck the senses and the imagination, like the images which we see in
sleep, or that we firmly believe we hear and see. The inhabitants of
Sodom were struck with a species of blindness,[340] which prevented
them from seeing the door of Lot's house, into which the angels had
entered. The soldiers who sought for Elisha were in the same way
blinded in some sort,[341] although they spoke to him they were
seeking for, who led them into Samaria without their perceiving him.
The two disciples who went on Easter-day to Emmaus, in company with
Jesus Christ their Master, did not recognize him till the breaking of
the bread.[342]

Thus, the apparitions of spirits to mankind are not always in a
corporeal form, palpable and real; but God, who ordains or permits
them, often causes the persons to whom these apparitions appear, to
behold, in a dream or otherwise, those spirits which speak to, warn,
or threaten them; who makes them see things as if present, which in
reality are not before their eyes, but only in their imagination;
which does not prove these visions and warnings not to be sent from
God, who, by himself, or by the ministration of his angels, or by
souls disengaged from the body, inspired the minds of men with what he
judges proper for them to know, whether in a dream, or by external
signs, or by words, or else by certain impressions made on their
senses, or in their imagination, in the absence of every external
object.

If the apparitions of the souls of the dead were