d
more brought to universal acceptance. Some men have fancied their
bodies composed of butter or of glass; but when compelled to move
out into the sunlight or the crowd they did not melt nor break.31
Esquirol had a patient who did not dare to bend her thumb, lest
the world should come to an end. When forced to bend it, she was
surprised that the crack of doom did not follow.

The mechanico theatrical character of the popular theology is
enough to reveal its origin and its fundamental falsity. The
difference between its lurid and phantasmal details and the calm
eternal verities in the divinely constituted order of nature is as
great as the difference between those stars which one sees in
consequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turning
his gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bare
appreciation of such a passage as that which closes
Chateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathos
of its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is its
sufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moon
is covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang half
detached from the vault of heaven, and the agony of the world
commences. Now resounds the trump of the angel. The sepulchres
burst: the human race issues all at once, and fills the Valley of
Jehoshaphat! The Son of Man appears in the clouds; the powers of
hell ascend from the infernal depths; the goats are separated from
the sheep; the wicked are plunged into the gulf; the just ascend
to heaven; God returns to his repose,

29 Preface, p. 10.

30 Ibid. p. 392.

31 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, ch. ix.

and the reign of eternity begins."32 Nothing saves this whole
scheme of doctrine from instant rejection except neglect of
thought, or incompetence of thought, on the part of those who
contemplate it. The peculiar dogmas of the exclusive sects are the
products of mental and social disease, psychological growths in
pathological moulds. The naked shapes of beautiful women floating
around St. Anthony in full display of their maddening charms are
interpreted by the Romanist Church as a visible work of the devil.
An intelligent physician accounts for them by the laws of
physiology, the morbid action of morbid nerves. There is no doubt
whatever as to which of these explanations is correct. The
absolute prevalence of that explanation is merely a question of
time. Meanwhile, it is the part of ever