422] Vide commentar. in Judic. ii.

[423] Hagg. i. 13.

[424] Malac. iii. 1.

[425] Deut. xviii. 18.

[426] Chron. xxi. 1.

[427] 2 Sam. xxiv. 1.

[428] Gen. iii. 2, 3.

[429] Job i. 7-9.

[430] Luke xiii. 16.

[431] Matt. xvii. 14. Luke ix. 37.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

SOME OTHER OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES.

In order to combat the apparitions of angels, demons, and disembodied
souls, we still bring forward the effects of a prepossessed fancy,
struck with an idea, and of a weak and timid mind, which imagine they
see and hear what subsists only in idea; we advert to the inventions
of the malignant spirits, who like to make sport of and to delude us;
we call to our assistance the artifices of the charlatans, who do so
many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes of the ignorant.
Philosophers, by means of certain glasses, and what are called magic
lanterns, by optical secrets, sympathetic powders, by their
phosphorus, and lately by means of the electrical machine, show us an
infinite number of things which the simpletons take for magic, because
they know not how they are produced.

Eyes that are diseased do not see things as others see them, or else
behold them differently. A drunken man will see objects double; to one
who has the jaundice, they will appear yellow; in the obscurity,
people fancy they see a spectre, when they see only the trunk of a
tree.

A mountebank will appear to eat a sword; another will vomit coals or
pebbles; one will drink wine and send it out again at his forehead;
another will cut off his companion's head, and put it on again. You
will think you see a chicken dragging a beam. The mountebank will
swallow fire and vomit it forth, he will draw blood from fruit, he
will send from his mouth strings of iron nails, he will put a sword on
his stomach and press it strongly, and instead of running into him, it
will bend back to the hilt; another will run a sword through his body
without wounding himself; you will sometimes see a child without a
head, then a head without a child, and all of them alive. That appears
very wonderful; nevertheless, if it were known how all those things
are done, people would only laugh, and be surprised that they could
wonder at and admire such things.

What has not been said for and against the divining-rod of Jacques
Aimar? Scripture proves to us the antiquity of divination by the
divining-rod, in the instance of Nebuchadnezzar,[432] and in what is
s