Mount Thabor. On this
distinction issue was taken by the disputatious Calabrian, and the result
was the convocation of a synod at Constantinople, whose decree
"established as an article of faith the uncreated light of Mount Thabor;
and, after so many insults, the reason of mankind was slightly wounded by
the addition of a single absurdity."

Of the truth of facts so long and openly discussed, there can be no
question. The monks of Mount Athos did indeed put themselves into a state
which may with safety be called one of mental lucidity, by fixing their
eyes intently on a point. Mr. Robertson, who used to induce the mesmeric
sleep by causing his votaries to fix their eyes on a wafer, had better
precedent than he supposed for his practice; and Miss Martineau, who, in
her artificial trances, saw all objects illuminated has been unconsciously
repeating a monastic method of worship. The contemptuous indifference of
Gibbon for once arises from defect of information; and when in a note he
observes that Mosheim "unfolds the causes with the judgment of a
philosopher," while Fleury "transcribes and translates with the prejudices
of a Catholic priest," himself gives a luculent example of the errors of
philosophy, and of the often unsuspected approach of prejudice to truth.
Mosheim's observation, notwithstanding the damaging approval of Gibbon, is
not without its value. "There is no reason," he says, "for any to be
surprised at this account, or to question its correctness. For among the
precepts and rules of all those in the East who teach men how to withdraw
the mind from the body, and to unite it with God, or inculcate what the
Latins call a contemplative and mystic life, whether they are Christians,
or Mohammedans, or Pagans, there is this precept, viz., _that the eyes
must be fixed every day for some hours upon some particular object_, and
that whoever does this will be rapt into a kind of ecstasy. See what
Engelbert Kempfer states concerning the monks and mystics of Japan; and
the account of those of India by Francis Bernier." Strange that Mosheim,
observing the uniformity both of the process and of its results in so many
different parts of the world, should not have suspected that there was
something more in this species of lucidity than the merely casual effects
of a distempered imagination. By fixing the gaze even of the lower animals
on an immovable point, they fall into a condition equally unnatural, and
which, if they had