oing to commence."[52]

Sometimes these hallucinations of sight and hearing are in curious
contrast with each other. "Not rarely," says Dr. Conolly Norman, "a
patient has visual hallucinations of a cheering kind--as of God or
angels; yet his auditory hallucinations are full of blasphemy, mockery,
and insult."[53]

Dr. Maudsley thus describes the general symptoms accompanying an
epileptic attack:--

"The patient's senses are possessed with hallucinations, his ganglionic
central cells being in a state of what may be called convulsive action;
before the eyes are blood-red flames of fire, amidst which whoever
happens to present himself appears as a devil or otherwise horribly
transformed; the ears are filled with a terribly roaring noise, or
resound with a voice imperatively commanding him to save himself; the
smell is one of sulphurous stifling, and the desperate and violent
actions are the convulsive reaction to such fearful hallucinations."[54]

If anyone will bear in mind the numerous descriptions of religious
visions, written in all good faith, and the behaviour of many an assumed
'inspired' character, he will have little difficulty in realising how
easily, to a people unacquainted with the real character of such
phenomena, epilepsy lends itself to a religious interpretation. It must
also be borne in mind that the consequences of vivid hallucinations
experienced during epilepsy do not always disappear with the attack to
which they were originally due.

It is certain that from the earliest times cases of what are undoubtedly
epilepsy have been taken as positive indications of supernatural
influence. "There is," says Emanuel Deutsch, "a peculiar something
supposed to inhere in epilepsy. The Greeks called it a divine disease.
Bacchantic and chorybantic furor were God-inspired stages. The Pythia
uttered her oracles under the most distressing signs. Symptoms of
convulsion were ever needed as a sign of the divine."[55] Much of the
evidence for the supernatural in the New Testament rests upon cases that
are obviously pathological in character. A man brings his son to Jesus
and describes how "ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the
water" (Matt. xvii. 15), and in another place (Mark ix. 18) the same
patient is described as having a dumb spirit, "and wheresoever he taketh
him, he teareth him; and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and
pineth away." The response to the father's appeal for help is an
exorc