NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 7 



false inference regarding the contents of each : the result was that 

 at the presentation of the holy water the devils were perfectly 

 calm, but when tried with the ordinary water they threw Martha 

 into convulsions. 



The next experiment made by the shrewd bishop was to simi- 

 lar purpose. He commanded loudly that a book of exorcisms 

 should be brought, and, under a previous arrangement, his attend- 

 ants brought him a copy of Virgil. No sooner had the bishop 

 begun to read the first line of the "^neid" than the devils threw 

 Martha into convulsions. On another occasion a Latin dictionary, 

 which she had reason to believe was a book of exorcisms, produced 

 a similar effect upon the devils. 



Although the good bishop was thereby led to pronounce the 

 whole matter a mixture of insanity and imposture, the capuchin 

 monks denounced this view as godless. They insisted that these 

 tests really proved the presence of Satan, showing his cunning in 

 covering up the proofs of his existence. The people at large sided 

 with their preachers, and Martha was taken to Paris, where vari-. 

 ous exorcisms were tried, and the Parisian mob became as devoted 

 to her as they had been twenty years before to the murderers of 

 the Huguenots, — as they became two centuries later to Robes- 

 pierre, — and as they are at the present moment to General Bou- 

 langer. 



But Bishop Miron was not the only skeptic. The Cardinal de 

 Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, charged the most eminent physicians 

 of the city, and among them Riolan, to report upon the case. 

 Various examinations were made, and the verdict was that Martha 

 was simply a hysterical impostor. Thanks, then, to medical sci- 

 ence, and to these two enlightened ecclesiastics who summoned its 

 aid, what fifty or a hundred years earlier would have been the 

 center of a wide-spread epidemic of possession was isolated, and 

 hindered from producing a national calamity.* 



But during the seventeenth century a theological reaction set 

 in, not only in France but in all parts of the Christian world, and 

 the belief in diabolic possession, though certainly dying, flickered 

 up hectic, hot, and spiteful through the whole century. In 1611 

 we have a typical case at Aix. An epidemic of possession having 

 occurred there, Gauffridi, a man of note, was burned at the stake 

 as the cause of the trouble. Michaelis, one of the priestly exor- 

 cists, declared that he had driven out sixty-five hundred devils 

 from one of the possessed. Similar epidemics occurred in various 

 parts of the world. \ 



Twenty years later a far more striking case occurred at Lou- 

 dun, in western France, where a convent of Ursuline nuns was 

 " afflicted by demons." 



* See Calmeil, "La Folie," tome i, livre 3, c 2. f See " Dagron," chap. ii. 



