1875.] Human Levitation. 51 
a statue to him in consequence.”’ It was also a count in 
his indictment for magic before Domitian. ‘The second and 
last levitation, from Rome to Puteoli, and its effects in 
court, are described with much apparent truth to nature, 
but Philostratus goes into the supposed reasons, and a 
panegyric of his hero’s wisdom, shown in the manner and 
timing of the marvel. Now he has to embody, as the chief 
piece extant from the hand of Apollonius, a very elaborate 
defence he had prepared for this occasion, and intended to 
have spoken by the waterclock; but not a word of which 
he really delivered, except the above line of Homer, where- 
with it was to have ended. ‘This glaring inconsistency 
strikes of course all commentatecrs, and poor Philostratus, 
at his wit’s end, seemingly despaired of glossing it over. It 
is created, however, solely by his gratuitous assumption that 
such thaums are the work of their subject. By all parallel 
accounts, from the case of Elijah to that of Mr. Home, they 
are so independent of his will, that we can no more suppose 
Apollonius to have known he was to be caught away, than 
do psychics of the present day. The inconsistency, then, 
disappears—nay, comes to tell strongly in the story’s favour. 
On the whole, is it not better attested than any other mar- 
vellous one of its age? And will any Christian consider it 
less called for, less opportune, or less worthily ascribable to 
the Supreme Providence than most of those in his Testa- 
ment? Can any say it would have occurred to better 
purpose at a trial of St. Paul or St. John? Supposing the 
account accurate, whatever intelligence directed the event 
so timed it as to force on a vast assembly the dogma that a 
man is no more liable to extin¢tion of being than Homer’s 
Apollo. And this in a world’s capital where, for well-nigh 
two centuries, all belief in an after-life had, among the most 
eeucated, been extinct. In the senate of Czsar’s and 
Cicero’s time, it was treated as a dream beneath serious 
notice. What could Christianity or any of its teachers do 
without this basis, which they rather assumed in their 
_ hearers than professed to prove? Paul could but appeal to 
his own veracity and apparent interests :—‘“‘ If the dead rise 
not,’ we are false witnesses, or we are ‘‘of all men most 
miserable.”” A Sadducee or a modern Comtist would reply, 
**So you are.” And ina society where such negation was 
held as a “‘positivism,” and no fa¢ts overthrew it, what 
change could aught that we find in the New Testament 
have effected ? 
Iamblichus, in the next century (De Myst., Bib, TiLscisys 
declared that one of the marks of obsession by spirits was, 
