a
sinner, make me worthy of this grace!' I held my hands together and
prayed, and then came a hand which squeezed my hands hard; immediately
thereupon I continued in prayer."[57]

Swedenborg confessed to repeated walks and talks with celestial
visitants, and, of course, all thought of imposture must be put on one
side. What one has to consider is whether we are to accept these
experiences as hallucinations or not. On the one side no further
evidence seems possible than the profound faith of the man himself, his
recognised mental ability, and the belief of his followers. And against
this it must be urged that the most complete honesty is no guarantee
against self-deception, while ability and even genius are not at all
incompatible with a pathologic strain. And in addition it must be borne
in mind that these hallucinations are, after all, part of a very large
class. Men of very little ability and influence experience substantially
the same visions; they occur all over the world, under all conditions of
culture, and always express the personal idiosyncrasies of the subject
and reflect the character of his social environment. One may safely say
that had Swedenborg lived a century later, while he might still have
gone through the same mental and physical experiences, he himself would
have given a very different interpretation of them.

St. Paul, Professor James points out, "certainly had once an epileptoid,
if not an epileptic seizure." One needs to add to this that the seizure
occurred at the one critical moment of his life which eventuated in his
conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Mary Magdalene, the first who
brought tidings of the resurrection, had been delivered of seven
devils. Luther's religious opinions were, of course, quite apart from
his physical state, sound or unsound. Still, even with him the reality
of supernatural intercourse became intensely vivid as a result of
nervous affections. His latest biographer points out that as a youth
while in the monastery he was seized with something that might well have
been an epileptic fit, and that although there is no record of a return
of this, he did suffer from ordinary fits of fainting.[58] He confesses
to have been much troubled, at twenty-two years of age, with giddiness
and noises in the ear, which he attributed to the devil. And right
through his life he attributed similar experiences to the same source.
Bunyan confesses that even during childhood the Lord