reply, that the return of souls to earth may depend neither on
their inclination nor their will, but on the will of God, who grants
this permission to whom he pleases, when he will, and as he will.

The wicked rich man asked that Lazarus[661] might be sent to this
world to warn his brothers not to fall into the same misfortune as
himself, but he could not obtain it. There are an infinity of souls in
the same case and disposition, who cannot obtain leave to return
themselves or to send others in their place.

If certain narratives of the return of spirits to earth have been
accompanied by circumstances somewhat comic, it does not militate
against the truth of the thing; since for one recital imprudently
embellished by uncertain circumstances, there are a thousand written
sensibly and seriously, and in a manner very conformable to truth.

He maintains that all the apparitions which cannot be attributed to
angels or to blessed spirits, are produced only by one of these three
causes:--the power of imagination; the extreme subtility of the
senses; and the derangement of the organs, as in cases of madness and
in high fevers.

This proposition is rash, and has before been refuted by the Reverend
Father Richard.

The author recounts all that he has said of the spirit of St. Maur, in
causing the motion of the bed in the presence of three persons who
were wide awake, the repeated shrieks of a person whom they did not
see, of a door well-bolted, of repeated blows upon the walls, of
panes of glass struck with violence in the presence of three persons,
without their being able to see the author of all this movement;--he
reduces all this to a derangement of the imagination, the subtilty of
the air, or the vapors casually arising in the brain of an invalid.
Why did he not deny all these facts? Why did he give himself the
trouble to compose so carefully a dissertation to explain a
phenomenon, which, according to him, can boast neither truth nor
reality? For my part, I am very glad to give the public notice that I
neither adopt nor approve this anonymous dissertation, which I never
saw before it was printed; that I know nothing of the author, take no
part in it, and have no interest in defending him. If the subject of
apparitions be purely philosophical, and it can without injury to
religion be reduced to a problem, I should have taken a different
method to destroy it, and I should have suffered my reasoning and my
imagination to