Montgeron, however, gives the fullest proofs of their reality; and even Bishop Douglas admits that many of these patients were invulnerable to fire! Many of them were weak women, who received blows on their chests, as they lay on the ground, which in any normal state would have pounded them to a jelly; yet they only expressed pleasure in it. One person, as attested by numbers, lay upon a stout peg fixed in the ground, and eight or ten inches high, sharply pointed, and had half a dozen persons standing on his chest, but without the peg piercing or hurting him. Montgeron says that Jane Moulu, a girl twenty-two or twenty-three, standing erect, with her back against a wall, received upon her stomach and belly one hundred blows of a hammer, weighing from twentynine to thirty pounds, which were administered by a very strong man. The girl declared that she could only be relieved by very violent blows. And Carré de Montgeron himself having given her sixty with all his force, the woman found them so inefficient, that she caused the hammer to be placed in the hands of a still stronger man, who gave her a hundred blows more. In order to test the force of the blows, Montgeron tried them against a stone wall. At the twentyfifth blow,' he says, the stone upon which I struck, which had been shaken by the preceding efforts, became loose; everything that retained it fell on the other side of the wall, and made an aperture more than half a foot in size.'

Upon other Convulsionaires a plank was laid, and as many men got upon it as could stand, until the convulsions were relieved. Montgeron says he saw a girl thus pressed under a weight enough to crush an ox. The author of the Vaens Efforts, an enemy of the convulsionists, corroborates this statement. Dr. Bertrand declares them strange and inconceivable, but too well attested to be disputed. M. de Montegre declares the evidence so complete, and so authentic, as to preclude all rational doubt; but the public acts preserved in the archives are the best proofs. Boyer, a contemporary author, says these Convulsionaires could see perfectly with their eyes bandaged. (Coup d'Eil sur les Con

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vulsions: Paris, 1733.) The author of Lettres sur l'ŒŒuvres des Convulsions, and many other witnesses, say the same. La Taste, a declared enemy of the Jansenists, declares that he had seen Convulsionaires who divined the thoughts of others, and displayed a knowledge of things impenetrable to all human subtlety. Dr. Bertrand, though opposed to them, admits the same. La Taste, Boyer, and the author of the Lettres sur l'Euvres des Convulsions, all attest that the Convulsionaires spoke in languages that they had never learned, sang songs in languages unknown to the bystanders, and that one woman understood things addressed to her in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. They, in fact, received those spiritual communications so frequent amongst mediums. It must be understood, however, that these convulsed people were thus affected by evil or disorderly spirits, and came to the tomb of the Abbé to obtain relief, which they did not obtain except with great difficulty. The attempt to designate the convulsions as natural effects is futile, for no natural causes could enable flesh and blood to resist the poundings which demolished a stone wall, and the monstrous pressure described.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND CONTINUED.

Truth is a suppliant, who, standing before the threshold, is for ever pressing towards the hearth, from which sin has banished it. As we pass and repass before that door, which it never quits, that majestic and mournful figure fixes for a moment our distracted attention. . . . We have not been able entirely to repudiate the truth; we still retain some unconnected fragments of it; what of its light our enfeebled eye can bear; what of it is proportioned to our condition. The rest we reject or disfigure-we retain but the name of things which we no longer possess.- Vinet's Vital Christianity.

ISHOP DOUGLAS, having treated the practical and

official statements of Montgeron with such unexampled untruth, proceeds to the wonderful cures of Mr. Valentine Greatrakes, of Affane, in the county of Waterford, Ireland. Mr. Greatrakes was a Protestant gentleman, who had been a lieutenant in the Earl of Orrery's regiment of horse, but had retired to his ancestral estate at Affane, and was clerk of the peace for the county of Cork, registrar for plantations, and justice of the peace. In a letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle he states that, in the year 1662, he had an impulse, or strong persuasion in his mind, for which he could not account, that the gift of healing the king's evil was conferred upon him. him. He mentioned it to his wife, but she thought it a strange imagination. Mrs. Greatrakes, however, had acted, as many ladies then did, as country doctress to her humble neighbours, and a tenant of Robert Boyle's brother, the

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Earl of Burlington and Cork, brought his son to her. Mrs. Greatrakes found him very much afflicted with king's evil about the neck and face, and told her husband, who said she should now see whether it was a mere fancy which possessed him. He laid his hands on the affected parts, prayed to God to heal him, in a few days found him wonderfully amended, and on a second application he was perfectly cured. He continued this practice for three years, not meddling with any other distempers; but the ague becoming frequent in the neighbourhood, he felt impressed to cure it, and succeeded, to his astonishment. He now extended his practice to all kinds of complaints, and cured great numbers, but not all. He says various persons were brought to him who had all the appearance of being possessed with dumb, deaf, and talking devils, and he expelled them, notwithstanding their violent resistance. He names the Mayor of Worcester, Colonel Birch, Major Wilde, and, at York House, London, Sir John Hinton, Colonel Talbot, and many others, as witnesses of such exorcisms.

His fame spread all over Ireland, and in 1666 the Earl of Orrery persuaded him to come to England, to cure Lady Conway of an obstinate head-ache. His plan was purely) apostolic; he put his hands on the diseased parts, and prayed to God to heal the sufferer, and when it took place, he gave God thanks for it. He never accepted any remuneration for his cases. It was remarkable that in Lady Conway's case he could do nothing, but during his abode at Ragley, the seat of Lord Conway, where he remained a month, he laid his hands upon more than a thousand persons from the country round, and performed many wonderful The Bishop of Dromore was there most of the time, and bears testimony to his marvellous cures. 'I have seen,' says the bishop, 'pains strangely fly before his hands, till he had chased them out of the body; dimness cleared, and deafness cured by his touch. Twenty persons, at several times, in fits of the falling sickness, were, in two or three minutes, brought to themselves, so as to tell where their

cures.

pain was, and then he hath pursued it till he hath driven it out at some extreme point. Running sores of the king's evil were dried up, and kernels were brought to a suppuration by his hand; grievous sores, of many months' date, in a few days healed, obstructions and stoppings removed, cancerous knots dissolved in the breast,' &c. All this the bishop thought 'extraordinary, but not miraculous.' What, indeed, could a Church of England bishop allow himself to confess miraculous? The bishop, had he witnessed Christ's miracles, would assuredly have remembered that he was ‘a high priest,' and taken good care not to admit that anything was a miracle.

At Worcester, Greatrakes' success was equally remarkable, and by command of Lord Arlington, secretary of state, he came up to court. He then took a house in Lincoln's-InnFields, and for many months continued there, performing the most extraordinary cures. As he was assailed, as a

matter of course, by all sorts of calumnies, especially from the medical men, he published an account, before leaving London, of all whom he had cured, with the names and abodes of the individuals. Besides this, the most distinguished men, physicians and others, attested, from personal knowledge, the reality of his cures. Amongst these were the celebrated philosopher Robert Boyle, Sir Nathaniel Holbatch, Sir John Godolphin, Sir Abraham Cullen, Sir Charles Doe, Colonel Weldon, Alderman Knight, Flamstead the astronomer, Dr. Cudworth, who attested the cure of his own son; Nathaniel Hobart, Master in Chancery, &c. Amongst physicians bearing unequivocal testimony to these cures were Sir William Smith, Dr. Denton, Dr. Fairclough, Dr. Jeremiah Astel, &c. Amongst divines, besides the Bishop of Dromore, Dr. Whichcote, attesting his own case; Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Bishop of Chester, Dr. Patrick, afterwards bishop; Dr. George Eames, &c.

John Doe, the son of Sir Charles Doe, relates that he had for three or four years been afflicted by an obstinate and violent headache, which had resisted all the means prescribed