MESMERISM, ODYLISM, TABLE-TURNING, ETC. 13 



of which ordinary experience does not furnish the rationale. And 

 while this very continuity is maintained by some to be an evidence of 

 the real existence of such agencies, it will be my purpose to show you 

 tliat it proves nothing more than the wide-spread diftusion, alike among 

 minds of the highest and of the lowest culture, of certain tendencies to 

 thought, which have either created ideal marvels possessing no foun- 

 dation whatever in fact, or have by exaggeration and distortion in- 

 vested with a preternatural character occurrences which ai-e perfectly 

 capable of a natural explanation. Thus, to go no further back than 

 the first century of the Christian era, we find the most wonderful nar- 

 rations, alike in the writings of pagan and Christian historians, of the 

 doings of the Eastern " sorcerers " and Jewish " exorcists " who had 

 spread themselves over the Roman Empire. Among these the Simon 

 Magus slightly mentioned in the book of Acts was one of the most 

 conspicuous, being recorded to have gained so great a repute for his 

 " ma^-ic arts " as to have been summoned to Rome by Nero to exhibit 

 them before him ; and a Christian father goes on to tell how, when 

 Simon was borne aloft through the air in a winged chariot in the sight 

 of the emperor, the united praters of the apostles Peter and Paul, pre- 

 vailing over the demoniacal agencies that sustained him, brought him 

 precipitately to the ground. In our own day, not only are we seri- 

 ously assured by a nobleman of high scientific attainments that he 

 himself saw Mr. Home sailing in the air, by moonlight, out of one 

 window and in at another, at a height of seventy feet from the ground ; 

 but eleven persons unite in declaring that Mrs. Guppy was not only 

 conveyed through the air in a trance all the way from Highbury Park 

 to Lamb's Conduit Street, but was brought by invisible agency into a 

 room of which the doors and windows were closed and fastened, com- 

 ing " plump down " in a state of complete unconsciousness and partial 

 deshabille upon a table, round which they were sitting in the dark, 

 shoulder to shoulder. 



Of course, if you accept the testimony of these witnesses to the 

 aerial flights of Mr. Home and Mrs. Guppy, you can have no reason 

 whatever for refusing credit to the historic evidence of the demoniacal 

 elevation of Simon Magus, and the victory obtained over his demons 

 by the two apostles. And you are still more bound to accept the 

 solemnly-attested proofs recorded in the proceedings of our law courts 

 within the last two hundred years, of the aerial transport of witches 

 to attend their demoniacal festivities ; the belief in witchcraft being 

 then accepted not only by the ignorant vulgar, but by some of the 

 wisest men of the time, such as Lord Bacon and Sir Matthew Hale, 

 Bishop Jewell, Richard Baxter, Sir Thomas Browne, and Addison, 

 while the denial of it was considered as virtual atheism. 



The general progress of rationalism, however, as Mr, Lecky has 

 well shown, has changed all this ; and to accept any of these marvels 

 we must place ourselves in the mental attitude of the narrator of Mrs. 



