ced occasionally, and, even in
these periods of superstition, were apparently regarded as not quite
everyday phenomena.

One thing in this matter is tolerably certain, namely, that intense
religious excitement produces a tendency to believe in marvels of
all sorts, and also begets a capacity for being hallucinated, for
beholding spectres, strange lights, dubious miracles. Thus every
one has heard of the temptation of St. Anthony, and of other early
Christian Fathers. They were wont to be surrounded by threatening
aspects of wild beasts, which had no real existence. In the same
way the early Zulu converts of Bishop Callaway, when they retired to
lonely places to pray, were haunted by visionary lions, and
phantasms of enemies with assegais. They, probably, had never heard
of St. Anthony's similar experiences, nor, again, of the diabolical
attacks on the converts of Catholic missionaries in Cochin China,
and in Peru.

Probably the most recent period of general religious excitement in
our country was that of the Covenant in Scotland. Not a mere
scattered congregation or two, as in the rise of Irvingism, but a
vast proportion of a whole people lived lives of prolonged ecstatic
prayer, and often neglected food for days. Consequently devout
Covenanters, retired in lonely places to pray, were apt to be
infested by spectral animals, black dogs as a rule, and they doubted
not at all that the black dog was the Accuser of the Brethren. We
have Catholic evidence, in Father Piatti's Life of Father
Elphinstone, S. J., to black dogs haunting Thomas Smeaton, the
friend of Andrew Melville (1580). But Father Piatti thinks that the
dogs were avenging devils, Smeaton being an apostate (MS. Life of
Elphinstone). Again Covenanters would see mysterious floods of
light, as the heathen also used, but, like the heathen, they were
not certain as to whether the light was produced by good or bad
spirits. Like poor bewildered Porphyry, many centuries earlier,
they found the spirits 'very deceitful'. You never can depend on
them. This is well illustrated by the Rev. Mr. Robert Law, a
Covenanting minister, but _not_ a friend of fanaticism and sedition.

In his Memorialls, a work not published till long after his death,
he gives this instance of the deceitfulness of sprites. The Rev.
Mr. John Shaw, in Ireland, was much troubled by witches, and by
'cats coming into his chamber and bed'. He died, so did his wife,
'and, as was supposed,