ness, Père Surin, who was in the habit of exorcising the nuns of Loudun, thus describes a part of what he saw: "I saw a thing which surprised me greatly, and which was common to all the possessed; it is this, that, in their paroxysms, when they were thrown down on their faces, their heads touched their heels, and they moved thus, as if walking, with an astonishing swiftness and for a great length of time. I saw one who, raising herself up, struck the chest and shoulders with her head, but with such quickness and violence that no one in the world, however agile the person might be, could do any thing approaching to it. As to their cries, it was what might be conceived of the bellowing of the condemned. There was nothing in it, nor in any thing else they did, which was human." Another of the many cotemporary writers upon this matter says, that "a day did not pass without exorcisms of the sisters, either public or private, of several hours' duration; and it is impossible to relate the extravagant scenes which took place on these occasions." The same writer, in the following passage, without seeming to be aware of it, exactly describes the most remarkable phenomenon of catalepsy. "In their exhaustion they became as a strip of lead, capable of being bent either backwards or forwards or on one side, so that their heads could be made to touch the ground; and they remained in that position in which they were placed till their attitudes were changed." Another writer tells us that these poor young women, in the intervals of the exorcisms, used to become tranquil, and endeavored "to resume their habits of labor, and the demeanor and comportment befitting young women of their rank and profession. Almost always the arrival of an exorcist sufficed to throw into disorder the nervous systems of the unfortunates." The sisters seem to have been very exact in their knowledge of the names and numbers of the devils with which they were possessed. The abbess believed that she was the abode of seven devils; some confessed to more, and some to fewer than these. Asmodeus, Leviathan, Isaacharon, Behemoth, and Astaroth, are the sounding titles of some of the demons who so terribly confused these poor young ladies. When the devils were commanded by the exorcists, who addressed them in Latin, to speak, they answered often, to the surprise of the priests, in the same language, but with some such modifications of its grammar as might have been expected from young ladies endeavoring to talk Latin from what they had learned of it at mass. Thus it is recorded that one devil replied to the question Anem adoras ? with the answer Jesus Christus. The exorcist, wishing to spare the fiend the disgrace of being ill-acquainted with the to put him right by modifying the quesuniversal language, endeavored upon this tion, Quis est iste quem adoras? But the stupid devil, being only just sharp enough to see that here a different case was required, answered Jesu Christe. A bystander had the levity to observe that the devil did not seem to understand concord; but Father Barre, the exorcist, maintained that the fiend had said or meant Adoro te, Jesu Christe; and the spectators, who were numerous, were too polite to disallow the explanation. The descriptions of the exorcisms at Loudun are frightful reading. We will not give the worst, which happily is only to be read in the cotemporary writers: "The superioress and two other nuns were exercised by Father Surin, before Gaston, Duke of Orleans, numerous courtiers and secular offidoctors, in May, 1635. It is impossible, withcials, civil and military officers, lawyers, and out indignation, to read the authentic accounts that are given of this revolting, cruel, and indecorous exhibition. . . The sufferers whose infirmities were thus exposed to the eyes of a profane, vulgar, morbid curiosity, were women devoted to religion, of virtuous lives, honorable families, of refined manners and feelings. The exorcists had their séances, as well as the animaland a certain number of the Court, wanted a magnetic-somnambulizers. Gaston, of Orleans, novel pastime, and it was procured for them at Loudun." During these exorcisms, the Père Surin was himself subdued by this imaginative yet most terrifically real malady, and he suffered for many years in body and soul from "the attacks of the demon Isaacharon." After some years of these terrible displays, "the King, with the advice of his council, thought fit to withdraw the pension for the maintenance of the exorcists, and in a little time" (says Père Surin, himself the principal exorcist) "these sisters obtained that which they hoped for." In another place, Surin admits that the sisters "n'étaient presque jamais possedée que pendant l'exorcisme.". Besides Surin, three other clerical exor her confessor, may stand as a companion piece to the above: "Darkened by the most horrible visions of hell, my mind permits no exercise of my reasoning would not willingly conduct myself in this devfaculties nothing save blasphemics; and as I ilish manner in public, I endeavor, without suc Therefore it is I now pour forth my fury to you, of my despair. But, behold! my troubles inand try to brighten my darkness by the flames crease. cists, with certain medical and legal functionaries engaged in the proceedings, were subdued by the moral contagion of the nuns of Loudun, and "went mad of demonomania." Surin's account of his own experiences, in his letter to Father d'Attichi, is of singular interest: "God has even permitted, I think in punish-cess, to divert my thoughts in every manner. ment of my sins, a thing which perhaps has never been witnessed in the Church-which is, that in the exercise of my ministry, the devil passes from the body of the possessed person but confusion. I perish when I could escape. In place of order, I encounter nothing and enters into mine; when he attacks me, It appears to me all my affairs go astray; never throws me down, agitates and thwarts me visibly, possessing me like a demoniac during sevany peace; all is disorder and rage. Blasphemy cral hours. I can not explain what passes in served by the contempt and annihilation of the is my nourishment, and my existence is preme during this time, nor how that spirit unites Word. I despise the advantage you take of itself to mine, still acting like another self, as if what I say. I will teach you that it is not what I had two souls, of which one is deprived of her body and of the use of her faculties, and you imagine. . . . I do not understand what I holds herself apart, contemplating the actions am now saying; in my mind and in my senses of the soul which now occupies the body. The there is a dreadful combat, and my heart is intwo spirits fight in the same field, which is the conceivably hardened. I certainly think I debody; and the soul is, as it were, divided. On ceive myself. I prefer to flatter myself with a the one side the soul is subject to diabolical in- figurative idea, and a particular conduct on the fluences, and on the other to her natural inclina- part of God, rather than to see myself in a perpetual fury, hatred, despair, and rage against tions, or those which God gives. At the same God and man. time I feel a great peace, under the will of God; state of delusion. I know well what I should I prefer to be in a maddening and then, without knowing how it comes, I feel an extreme rage and hatred towards him; and do, but I know not what hinders me from doing this produces, in such a way as to astonish be- it. It is impossible for me to act otherwise than holders, a violent impetus to separate myself and in a greater degree, I would suffer it; but I do. If a creature could suffer greater fury, from him. Then all at once, I experience great that could not be without its own destruction. joy and comfort, which I express by cries and I know not why I speak thus, without either reawailings like those of demons. I feel in a reson or connection; the meaning of it will some probate state; I fear it; and the strange soul, which seems to be mine, is pierced, as it were, in truth confess that you give me extreme pain day be revealed to you. I must seriously and with sharp goads of despair; while the other soul, in perfect trust, laughs at such sentiments, demned house; but those special prayers which by the prayers which you offer for this conand freely curses him who is the cause of them. I am even sensible that the very cries which you add to the others make me desperate. I proceed from my mouth come equally from both can not submit to all you require. Command, I beseech you, no more, if you would not end these souls, and I can not distinguish if they my miserable life by despair. All I can do is are produced by joy, or by the extreme frenzy to unite myself to the hatred of all the blasphethat fills me. . I never find prayer more mies which are committed, which have been, easy or more tranquil than during these troubles, and which ever shall be committed. Do not While my body is rolling on the ground, and the ministers of the Church speak to me as to oblige me to repeat praises: it is difficult to praise what one hates above all the world. I a demon, and load me with maledictions, I can not express to you what joy I feel, having be- am forced here to compare myself to mankind in general. You understand perfectly what I come a demon, not by rebellion against God, would say. Who can be more full of hatred but by a calamity which shows me in a lively than a person who is united to the devil? How manner the state to which sin has reduced me; I rave in my hatred! How I honor my hatred, and thus taking to myself all the curses which which supports me against an Infinite Power! are heaped upon me, my soul becomes more absorbed in her nothingness. When the demoniacs see me in this state, it is interesting to observe how they triumph, and how the devils defy me, saying: 'Physician, cure thyself. Begone! Ascend now the pulpit. How delightful to see him preach now, after his rolling upon the ground!' The following letter, written by one of the sisters of the Convent of Louviers to Love, thou that wert once the second thou art now the first thing to be irreparably principle of my being, and my delight in God, changed. Woe to me!" It is in accordance with the laws of mental disease that these terrible manifestations should happen, as they usually seem to have done, in those convents in which the strictest observance was paid "Right life is this: exalted aims, With moderation in the means." to the "mortification of the flesh," accord-] that it might be burned; and in the coning to monastic ideas of that duty. The demnation to the stake of another ecclesiassisters of the Convent of Louviers, for ex- tic named Thomas Boullé, these men beample, "aspired to an extraordinary de- ing convicted of sorcery on the evidence gree of perfection, which they sought to of a raving mad woman, Madeleine Bavan, attain by austerities and mortifications of who deposed to the following effects in excessive rigor, passing the greater part reply to the leading questions of her exof the night in prayer, fasting with such aminers: For a long time she had atstrictness as to leave themselves attenu- tended the infernal sabbaths. On one of ated; inflicting corporal punishment on these occasions she had been married to themselves of extraordinary severity; and a devil named Dagon, of a distinguished even in the depth of winter nights leaving rank in hell. Father Picard had composed their dormitory to lie in snow." Nature, a great number of charms, and she had so outraged, always inflicts a fearful pun- done the same. At his instigation she ishment in a reaction of some sort or other. had endeavored to convert the superiorWe should hear less of the "backslidings" ess of the convent to the worship of of the saints, even in our own day, if they Satan, and had deposited certain charms had a better understanding of the truth, for that end in the infirmary. The devils thatoften appeared to her in the form of cats, and Father Picard approached her criminally at the devils' sabbaths. The infants of several witches had been cut to pieces to make charms, and Father Picard and she had put the children to death. On a holy Thursday she had eaten part of a roast child. They nailed some of the children to crosses, and drove nails into their heads in the form of a crown. On one occasion, when many blasphemies had been pronounced at the infernal sabbath, our Lord appeared and reduced several of the sorcerers to dust with a thunderbolt. Thomas Boullé had been marked by a devil in her presence; and when Picard officiated at the devils' sabbath, Boullé acted as deacon. Once Picard touched her and said: "You will see what will happen." She felt greatly agitated, and went into the garden for air; here a horrible cat, jumping on her, placed its fore-feet on her shoulders and the claws of its hind feet on her knees, "with the design, as she supposed, of profaning the sacrament, which she had just received." When Picard was dead his corpse talked to her; and a large black beast, which appeared as if from a cloud, counseled her to put herself in the power of Thomas Boullé, as she had hitherto been in that of Picard. This evidence of Madeleine Bevan, corroborated by the testimony of others to the fact that Boullé could cure the toothache, and was in the habit of reading books the covers of which were besmoked, was held sufficient. Out of fifty sisters of Louviers, eighteen went mad with their austerities; and it was observed that "the nuns who previously exhibited most veneration for holy things and religious observances, were those who held them in greatest horror from the time the disorder set in." The most utter moral perversion usually followed the most presumptuous spiritual aspirations. It was scarcely surprising that, in an unscientific age, so fearful a phenomenon as this sudden casting down of the soul from its high places into unspeakable degradation, should have been universally attributed to the immediate influence of the devil and his angels; nor is it wonderful that the theory of demoniacal possession should have been irresistibly corroborated by the actual appearance of devils to the imagination of women full of the idea that their calamities had such an origin. Next to the image of the devil, that of the spiritual director of the convent generally, and not unnaturally, haunted the fancies of young women in a state of seclusion which did violence to the laws of nature. Apparitions of the director entering the dormitories at night and endeavoring to draw them into sin, were not uncommon, and usually ended in a charge of sorcery against some pious man, who was burned alive upon the testimony of insane witnesses. The epidemic at the convent of Louviers, for example, ended in the exhumation of the body of Father Picard, a former director, in order The examples which we have now given of contagious mental disease from religious causes, in Roman Catholic convents, represent only one phase of a malady which has taken innumerable forms, ac- a wolf... This malady,' saith Avicencording to the nature of the religious na, 'troubleth men most in February, and ideas and images which have accompanied is nowadays frequent in Bohemia and the fundamental cause of the evil in each case-namely, the fanatical belief of some individual in the existence and operation of superhuman influences, capable of acting in and upon the human spirit without its coöperation-a belief which is itself insanity, and which, when it is real and entire, is sure to produce phenomena which seem to prove its truth, and which, therefore immediately tend to propagate the same belief in others. Possession by devils, Saint Vitus's dance as it appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the conversion of men into loup garous, the convulsions of the Jansenists, the Irvingite gabble in the unknown tongue, modern mesmerism, and many similar phenomena, are all branches of the same tree. Of all these forms of spiritual possession, "Lycanthropy" is the most strange. Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, speaks of "Lycanthropia, or wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields at night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves. . Donatus ab Altomari saith that he saw two of them in his time. . . This disease, perhaps, gave occasion to that bold assertion of Pliny-Some men turned into wolves in his time, and from wolves to men again;' and to that fable of Pausanias, of a man who was ten years were Hungary.' According to Heurnius, they lie hid, most part, all day, and go abroad in the night, barking, howling, at graves and deserts; they have usually hollow eyes, scabbed legs, very dry and pale, saith Altomarus." At different periods during the dark ages, lycanthropy appears to have taken an epidemic form in almost every country of Europe. Dr. Madden gives the following amusing extract from Camden concerning a species of Lycanthropy which appeared in the county of Leicester in 1341. as in our age had not been heard of before, hap"This wondrous prodigie following, and such pened in the county of Leicester, where a certain waifaring man, as he travelled in the king's highway, found a paire of gloves fit, as he thought, for his own turne, which, as he drewe them upon his hands, forthwith, instead of a man's voice and speech, he kept a strange and from that present, the elder folke and full growmervaillous barking like unto a dogge: and en, yea, and women too throughout the same county barked like big dogges, but the children and little one waughed as small whelpes. The plague continued with some, eighteen days, with others, a whole moneth, and with some for two yeares. Yea, this foresaid contagious malady entered also into the neighboring shires, and forced the people in like maner to barke." Loup garous, when they were caught, were usually burned alive. From the Dublin University Magazine. THE ERIC I. I NEVER had a home like other children when I was a child. I was early left without father or mother, and almost without kith or kin. I was left poor, too, without enough, baby as I was, even to keep me from being a burden on those who were forced to take the charge of me. I was in the world simply and solely a little, desolate, useless child. KSONS. The home such as it was, that fell to my lot, was in the house of an aunt of my father's, an old lady who took me to live with her from a feeling rather of duty than of love, and into whose formal household my childish advent made, I am afraid, no very welcome inroad. Yet my aunt was kind to me, if she was cold; and I, who had never known a more genial home, was content with the one that had fallen to my share. We led a peaceful, quiet life. There was no poetry in it, but we did without that; there was little beauty in it, too, but we do not feel the want of what we have never known. I was housed, and fed, and clad; and if the world that during those years hedged me in was a very narrow one, I did not feel its narrowness, for I had never seen what lay beyond its limits. This existence endured for me until I was eighteen; then my grand-aunt died. I recollect that parting vividly still as the first sorrow and the first glimpse of the hidden things outside our daily life that I had ever had. My aunt had left me all she was possessed of, and after her death I lived alone for a few months. At the end of that time I was surprised one day by a letter from my godmother, Mrs. Erickson, which asked if I would come and live with her. Mrs. Erickson had been a cousin of my mother's. Long ago, when I had been a little child, she had shown me some kindnesses that I had not forgotten. Her proposal was pleasant to me, and I accepted it. I set my house in order and obtained a tenant for it; then, one autumn day, when the sun shone bright on harvest fields, I bade farewell to the village where I had lived, and set forth upon my jour ney to my new home. That journey's end brought me to a quaint old town, dark with long narrow streets, whose stones time had impressed with his seal of solemn coloring, whose gloomy dimness only here and there stole into sudden light at some unlooked-for opening, where the sun shone upon the grass growing around the pavement of an untrod square or glinted on a bend of the bright silent river, or lingered lovingly upon the tall, gray, half-decaying towers of some old time-eaten church. I saw it linger so for the first time on that autumn evening, and the light, new to me at that time, quickly grew familiar, for in the opening before one such old church my godmother had her house, and summer and winter, between her windows and the rivulet, there stood an eternal screen of blackening stone-a mouldering pile, all rich with antique devices upon wall and capital and archivault, and delicate traceried windows, through whose narrow lights there came to us all that we ever saw of the gold and crimson of the western sky. It was a change from the village and the house that I had left! There all had been flat, clear, open as the sea; neither brick nor stone obscured our viewneither tree nor tower darkened us; undulating fields and hedge-rows there shut out no prospect; all was bright and sunny there, from zenith to horizon. This new confinement, at its first sight, was strange and painful to me. I recollect on the night I came that I stood by one of those west windows and drew my traveling cloak around me with an involuntary shiver. The sun had set, and the sky above was gray, and the black decaying walls, in that cold twilight, looked strangely sorrowful -stern, too, and pitiless-a black cold shadow, whose beauty I could not see, and whose solemn age-grim mouldering memorial of the vanished centuries-only chilled me. I had not seen my godmother for eleven years. When we last met she was an active, bright-looking woman, of five-andthirty. When she greeted me at her threshold now, I did not recognize her: she had grown faded, and pale, and old. "I was stronger and younger when I saw you last, Ruth," she said gently, when I spoke of the change in her: but there was a real and anxious look in her face that I thought must be set there by other causes than advancing years or failing strength. "And my cousin, Noel ?" He was her only son-a man ten years or so older than I was. I had seen him once-those eleven years ago-and had one day been carried in his strong arms through a hazel copse, when a long wandering amidst fallen autumn leaves had wet my feet-a small kindness that I had remembered faithfully. She answered, "You will scarcely remember Noel" and I presently found that she said right. As we sat together a little while after, talking by the fire, a man entered the room, and coming up to me, put out his hand with a single cold phrase of welcome. I looked up into his face as I answered his salute, and with that look, something that had been a kind of hope in me, sank down with a quick short pang. No-I had no recognition for this Noel Erickson. That cold repellent face was all strange to me. It was a small thing to speak of-a slight disappointment-and yet out of my child's prose life, it was something to lose the sunshine of one pleasant memory. We fell calmly, and at once, into a |