454 Insanity. [ Nov. 
any sign of wound, injury, or exhaustion—apparently from emotion. 
Diseases, unobserved before, he says, appeared on the sudden cessation 
of the war. Some among the royalists, of a desponding character, he 
describes specifically under the name of revolutiana ; while others, which 
were observable among the revolutionists of an opposite cast, he classes 
as anarchia. Among the women, hysterical and other complaints were 
suspended, and new disorders apparently generated. Similar effects. on 
females were observed during the Scotch rebellion of 1745; and the 
siege of Paris, by the allies, in 1814, occasioned, according to the report 
of French physicians, much irregularity of the same kind, and apoplexy 
and mania were more frequent. 
Among the moral causes of intellectual derangement, religion has been 
enumerated, mainly because so many insane persons have been possessed 
by religious hallucinations. Excited to excess, every emotion and passion 
is capable of bringing on madness—if so, religion, calculated as are its 
tremendous considerations to influence our feelings, may well be sup- 
posed, by possibility, to be a cause of insanity. But still, though the 
hallucination be a religious one, the real source of insanity may be the 
very reverse of religion, and thus the religious hallucination itself, rather 
be the effect, than the cause of insanity. Generally, those who go mad 
through religion, as it is called, are people of susceptible temperaments, 
or very weak heads. Injudicious preachers, addressing themselves, as 
they chiefly do, to the weak and uninformed, may readily shake an 
addled understanding. It is quite idle, to impute the effect, as most 
people do, to the mysticism of the tenets inculcated, or to the intense- 
ness, with which abstract theology is cultivated, or to the subject of 
religion. being impressed too ardently on persons too young or too much 
informed to comprehend it. It is obviously much more to the purpose 
to look to the condition in which the perceptive and reasoning powers 
actually were, before religion appeared to bring on derangement. Dr. 
Burrowes’ great experience goes to shew that the effect springs imme- 
diately from some perversion of religion, or the discussion or adoption of 
novel and extravagant doctrines, at a juncture when the understanding, 
from other causes, is already shaken. Nor does he recollect one instance 
of insanity, arising apparently from a religious source, where the party 
had been undisturbed about opinions. It appeared to him, always to 
originate during the conflict between opposite doctrines before convic- 
tion was determined. While the mind is in suspense from the dread of 
doing wrong in matters of conscience, and the balance is poised between 
old and new doctrines, involving salvation, the feelings are excited, 
says he, to a morbid degree of sensibility. In so irritable a state, an 
incident, which at any other time would pass unheeded, will elicit the 
latent spark, and inflame the mind to madness. Dr. Halloran, who had 
capital opportunities for observation, remarked, that in the Cork Lunatic 
Asylum, where Catholics in proportion to Protestants are ten to one, no 
instance of mental derangement, from this cause, occurred among the 
Catholics, but several among protestant dissenters. The fact is—and 
very important it is to the present purpose—Catholic ministers will not 
permit their flocks to discuss the subject of doctrines—distrust in these 
matters—doctrines or discipline—is denounced at once as stark heresy. 
The moment of peril—as to insane effects we mean—is when old opinions 
im. matters of faith are wayering, or the adoption of new ones recent, and 
not yet quietly subsided ; and from this peril the Catholic is obviously 
