e various manifestations in order, and beginning with the
alleged power of resisting the action of fire, the reader will not need to
be reminded of many seemingly well-authenticated cases of escape from the
fire-ordeal. It has been usual to ascribe the preservation of those who
have walked bare-footed over heated ploughshares to the use of astringent
lotions: and where opportunity existed for preparation of that kind, their
escape may perhaps be so explained. But in most instances the accused was
in the custody of the accusers, and not likely to have access to such
phylacteries. The exemption from the effects of fire was not confined to
those cases of exaltation attendant on the enthusiasm of conscious virtue.
Bosroger (La Piete Affligee, Rouen, 1752) states of one of the possessed
sisters of St. Elizabeth at Louviers, in 1642: "One morning Sister
Saint-Esprit was rapt as in an ecstasy. The bishop commanded the devil to
leave her. Immediately she experienced dreadful contortions, and an access
of rage, and, on a sudden, says the exorcist, her demon left her like a
flash of lightning, and threw the young woman into the fire, which was a
considerable one, casting her with her face and one hand direct between
the two andirons; and when they ran to drag her away, they found that
neither her face nor her hand were in anywise burnt."

It would be idle to multiply instances of this sort from the monkish
writers. The preservation of the three youths in the Chaldaean furnace was
one of the miracles most adapted to the servile yet audacious imitations
of the Thaumaturgists. It is only when their statements correspond in
unsuspected particulars with the phenomena of experience--as, for example,
in the case of Barlaam and the monks of Mount Athos--that they can be
adduced without offending the judgment of rational inquirers. But the
action of burning is an operation of mechanical and chemical forces; and
how any amount of spiritual or electrical effusion could prevent the
expansion of the fluids in the tissues and the disruption of the skin,
seems hard to imagine. Something more must, one should think, have been
needed; and if the mesmeric and Pagan oracular ecstasies be identical,
this testimony of Jamblichus would lead us to suppose that that something
was supplied by the mind. However this may be, we shall be better able to
judge after the investigation of some other of the alleged concomitants of
Pagan inspiration.

The insensi