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Tine brought necessary changes: the Church being extended, strengthened, and enriched, had occasion for new laws.

is not.

APPARITION.

deigned to employ these apparitionsthese visions, in favour of the Jews, who were then its cherished people.

It may be that, in the course of time, some really pious souls, deceived by It is not at all uncommon for a person their enthusiasm, have believed that they under strong emotion to see that which had received from an intimate communiIn 1726, a woman in London,cation with God that which they owed accused of being an accomplice in her only to their inflamed imaginations. In husband's murder, denied the fact; the such cases, there is need of the advice of dead man's coat was held up and shaken an honest man, and especially of a good before her, her terrified imagination pre-physician. sented the husband himself to her view; she fell at his feet, and would have em-rable. It is said to have been in consebraced him. She told the jury that she had seen her husband.

It is not wonderful that Theodoric saw in the head of a fish, which was served up to him, that of Symmachus, whom he had assassinated-or unjustly executed; for it is precisely the same thing. Charles IX., after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, saw dead bodies and blood, not in his dreams, but in the convulsions of a troubled mind seeking for sleep in vain. His physician and his nurse bore witness to it. Fantastic visions are very frequent in hot fevers. This is not seeing in imagination; it is seeing in reality. The phantom exists to him who has the perception of it. If the gift of reason, vouchsafed to the human machine, were not at hand to correct these illusions, all heated imaginations would be in an almost continual transport, and it would be impossible to cure them.

It is especially in that middle state, betwixt sleeping and waking, that an inflamed brain sees imaginary objects, and hears sounds which nobody utters. Fear, love, grief, remorse, are the painters who trace the pictures before unsettled imaginations. The eye which sees sparks in the night, when accidentally pressed in a certain direction, is but a faint image of the disorders of the brain.

No theologian doubts, that with these natural causes the Master of nature has sometimes united his divine influence. To this the Old and the New Testament bear ample testimony. Providence has

The stories of apparitions are innume

quence of an apparition that St. Theodore, in the beginning of the fourth century, went and set fire to the temple of Amasia, and reduced it to ashes. It is very likely that God did not command this action, in itself so criminal, by which several citizens perished, and which exposed all the Christians to a just revenge.

God might permit St. Potamienne to appear to St. Basilides; for there resulted no disturbance to the state. We will not deny that Jesus Christ might appear to St. Victor. But, that St. Benedict saw the soul of St. Germanus of Capua carried up to heaven by angels; and that two monks afterwards saw the soul of St. Benedict walking on a carpet extended from heaven to Mount Cassino;-this is not quite so easy to believe.

It may likewise, without any offence to our august religion, be doubted, whether St. Eucherius was conducted by an angel into hell, where he saw Charles Martel's soul; and whether a holy hermit of Italy saw the soul of Dagobert chained in a boat by devils, who were flogging it without mercy; for, after all, it is rather difficult to explain satisfactorily how a soul can walk upon a carpet, how it can be chained in a boat, or how it can be flogged.

But, it may very well be, that heated brains have had such visions; from age to age we have a thousand instances of them. One must be very enlightened to distinguish, in this prodigious number of visions, those which came from God

APPARITION.

himself, from those which were purely the offspring of imagination.

the order of the divine warnings, and the conduct of divine grace."

The illustrious Bossuet relates, in his The reader, then, must peruse this funeral oration over the Princess Palatine, story with the same reverence with which two visions which acted powerfully on its hearers listened to it. These extraorthat princess, and determined the whole dinary workings of Providence are like the conduct of her latter years. These hea-miracles of canonised saints, which must venly visions must be believed, since they be attested by irreproachable witnesses. are regarded as such by the discreet and { And what more lawful deponent can we learned Bishop of Meaux, who pene- have, to the apparitions and visions of the trated into all the depths of theology, and Princess Palatine, than the man who emeven undertook to lift the veil which co-ployed his life in distinguishing truth from vers the Apocalypse. appearance?-who combated vigorously against the nuns of Port-Royal on the formulary-against Paul Ferri on the catechism-against the minister Claude on the variations of the Church -against Doctor Dupin on China-against Father Simon on the understanding of the sacred text-against Cardinal Sfondrate on predestination-against the Pope on the rights of the Gallican church-against the Archbishop of Cambray on pure and disinterested love. He was not to be seduced by the names, nor the titles, nor the reputation, nor the dialectics of his adversaries. He related this fact; therefore he believed it. Let us join him in his belief, in spite of the raillery which it has occasioned. Let us adore the secrets of Providence: but let us distrust the wanderings of the imagination, which Mallebranche called la folle du logis. For these two visions, accorded to the Princess Palatine, are not vouchsafed to every one.

He says, then, that the Princess Palatine, having lent a hundred thousand francs to her sister the Queen of Poland, sold the duchy of Rételois for a million, and married her daughters advantageously. Happy according to the world, but unfortunately doubting the truths of the Christian religion, she was brought back to her conviction, and to the love of these ineffable truths, by two visions. The first was a dream, in which a man born blind, told her that he had no idea of light, and that we must believe the word of others in things of which we cannot ourselves conceive. The second arose from a violent shock of the membranes and fibres of the brain in an access of fever. She saw a hen running after one of her chickens, which a dog held in his mouth. The Princess Palatine snatched the chick from the dog; on which, a voice cried out, "Give him back his chicken; if you deprive him of his food, he will not watch as he ought." But the princess exclaimed, "No, I will never give it back."

The chicken was the soul of Anne of Gonzaga, Princess Palatine; the hen was the Church; and the dog was the Devil. Anne of Gonzaga, who was never to give back the chicken to the dog, was efficacious grace.

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Jesus Christ appeared to St. Catharine of Sienna; he espoused her, and gave her a ring. This mystical apparition is to be venerated, for it is attested by Raymond of Capua, general of the Dominicans, {who confessed her, as also by Pope Urban VI. But it is rejected by the learned Fleuir, author of the Ecclesiastical History. And a young woman, who should now boast of having contracted such a marriage, might receive as a nuptial present & place in a lunatic asylum.

Bossuet preached this funeral oration to the Carmelite nuns of the faubourg St. Jacques, at Paris, before the whole house of Condé; he used these remark- The appearance of Mother Angelica, able words" Hearken; and be espe- abbess of Port-Royal, to Sister Dorothy, cially careful not to hear with contempt { is related by a man of very great weight

phant very small; and what we call small, is to insects a world.

among the Jansenists, the Sieur Dufossé, author of the Memoirs de Pontis. Mother Angelica, long after her death, came The same motion which would be rapid and seated herself in the Church of Port- to a snail, would be very slow in the eye Royal, in her old place, with her crosier of an eagle. This rock, which is impein her hand. She commanded that Sister netrable by steel, is a sieve consisting of Dorothy should be sent for, and to her more pores than matter, and containing a she told terrible secrets. But the testi-thousand avenues of prodigious width mony of this Dufossé is of less weight than that of Raymond of Capua, and Pope Urban VI., which, however, have not been formally received.

The writer of the above paragraphs has since read the Abbé Langlet's four volumes on Apparitions, and thinks he ought not to take anything from them. He is convinced of all the apparitions verified by the church; but he has some doubts about the others, until they are authentically recognized. The Cordeliers and the Jacobins, the Jansenists and the Molinists, have all had their apparitions and their miracles. "Iliacos inter muros peccatur et extra."

APPEARANCE.

ARE all appearances deceitful? Have our senses been given us only to keep us in continual delusion? Is everything error? Do we live in a dream, surrounded by shadowy chimeras? We see the sun setting, when he is already below the horizon: before he has yet risen, we see him appear. A square tower seems to be round. A straight stick, thrust into the water, seems to be bent.

leading to its centre, in which are lodged multitudes of animals, which may, for aught we know, think themselves the masters of the universe.

Nothing is either as it appears to be, or in the place where we believe it to be. Several philosophers, tired of being constantly deceived by bodies, have in their spleen pronounced that bodies do not exist, and that there is nothing real but our minds. As well might they have concluded that, all appearances being false, and the nature of the soul being as little known as that of the matter, there is no reality in either body or soul.

Perhaps it is this despair of knowing anything which has caused some Chinese philosophers to say, that Nothing is the beginning and the end of all things.

This philosophy, so destructive to being, was well known in Molière's time. Doctor Macphurius represents the school; when teaching Sganarelle, he says, "You must not say, 'I am come,' but it seems to me that I am come; for it may seem to you, without such being really the case.'

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But at the present day, a comic scene is not an argument, though it is sometimes better than an argument; and there is often as much pleasure in seeking after truth as in laughing at philosophy.

You do not see the net-work, the ca

You see your face in a mirror, and the image appears to be behind the glass: it is, however, neither behind nor before it. This glass, which to the sight and the touch is so smooth and even, is no other than an unequal congregation of pro-vities, the threads, the inequalities, the jections and cavities. The finest and fairest skin is a kind of bristled net-work, the openings of which are incomparably larger than the threads, and enclose an infinite number of minute hairs. Under this net-work there are liquors incessantly passing, and from it there issue continual exhalations which cover the whole surface. What we call large is to an ele

exhalations of that white and delicate skin which you idolize. Animals a thousand times less than a mite discern all these objects which escape your vision; they lodge, feed, and travel about in them, as in an extensive country, and those on the right arm are perfectly igno rant that there are creatures of their owl. species on the left. If you were so un

fortunate as to see what they see, your charming skin would strike you with horror.

The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; and perhaps it kills them. We see, touch, hear, feel things, only in the way in which they ought to be seen, touched, heard, or felt by ourselves.

Had Cæsar been born in the time of Scipio Africanus, he would not have subjugated the Roman commonwealth; nor would Mahomet, could he rise again at the present day, be more than sheriff of Mecca. But if Archimedes and Virgil were restored, one would still be the best mathematician, the other the best poet of his country.

ARABS;

AND, OCCASIONALLY, ON The book of

JOB.

All is in due proportion. The laws of optics, which show you an object in the water where it is not, and break a Ir any one be desirous of obtaining a right line, are in entire accordance with thorough knowledge of the antiquities of those which make the sun appear to you Arabia, it may be presumed that he will with a diameter of two feet, although it is gain no more information than about those a million times larger than the earth. To of Auvergne and Poitou. It is, however, see it in its true dimensions, would re-certain, that the Arabs were of some conquire an eye collecting his rays at an angle as great as his disk, which is impossible. Our senses, then, assist much more than they deceive us.

Motion, time, hardness, softness, dimensions, distance, approximation, strength, weakness, appearances, of whatever kind,-all is relative. And who has created these relations?

A-PROPOS.

ALL great successes, of whatever kind, are founded upon things done or said à-propos.

sequence long before Mahomet. The Jews themselves say that Moses married an Arabian woman; and his father-in-law Jethro seems to have been a man of great good sense.

Mecca is considered, and not without reason, as one of the most ancient cities in the world. It is, indeed, a proof of its antiquity, that nothing but superstition could occasion the building of a town on such a spot; for it is in a sandy desert, where the water is brackish, so that the people die of hunger and thirst. The country a few miles to the east is the most delightful upon earth, the best watered and the most fertile. There the Arabs

But it was enough for some charlatan, some false prophet, to give out his reveries, to make of Mecca a sacred spot and the resort of neighbouring nations. Thus it was that the temple of Jupiter Ammon was built in the midst of sands.

Arnold of Brescia, John Huss, and Jerome of Prague, did not come quite à-propos: the people were not then suf-should have built, and not at Mecca. ficiently enlighted; the invention of printing had not then laid the abuses complained of before the eyes of every one. But when men began to read-when the populace, who were solicitous to escape purgatory, but at the same time wished not to pay too dear for indul- Arabia extends from north-east to southgences, began to open their eyes, the re-west, from the desert of Jerusalem to formers of the sixteenth century came quite à-propos, and succeeded.

It has been elsewhere observed, that Cromwell under Elizabeth or Charles the Second, or Cardinal De Retz when Louis XIV. governed by himself, would have been very ordinary persons.

Aden or Eden, about the fiftieth degree of north latitude. It is an immense country, about three times as large as Germany. It is very likely that its deserts of sand were brought thither by the waters of the ocean, and that its marine gulphs were once fertile lands.

The belief in this nation's antiquity is favoured by the circumstance that no historian speaks of its having been subjugated. It was not subdued even by Alexander, nor by any king of Syria, nor by the Romans. The Arabs, on the contrary, subjugated a hundred nations, from the Indus to the Garonne; and, having afterwards lost their conquests, they retired into their own country, and did not mix with any other people.

the second chapter of the Koran, which Mahomet had posted, he fell on his knees before him, and said, “O Mohammed, son of Abdallah, son of Motalib, son of Achem, thou art a greater poet than Ithou art doubtless the prophet of God."

The Arabs of Maden, Naïd, and Sanaa, were no less generous than those of the desert were addicted to plunder. Among them, one friend was dishonoured if he had refused his assistance to another.

In their collection of verses, entitled

Having never been subject to nor mixed with other nations, it is more than proba-Tograïd, it is related that, "one day, in ble that they have preserved their manners and their language. Indeed, Arabic is, in some sense, the mother-tongue of all Asia as far as the Indus; or rather the prevailing tongue, for mother-tongues have never existed. Their genius has never changed. They still compose their Nights' Entertainments, as they did when they imagined one Bac or Bacchus, who passed through the Red Sea with three millions of men, women, and children; who stopped the sun and moon, and made streams of wine issue forth with a blow of his rod, which, when he chose, he changed into a serpent.

the temple of Mecca, three Arabs were disputing on generosity and friendship, and could not agree as to which, among those who then set the greatest examples of these virtues, deserved the preference. Some were for Abdallah, son of Giafar, uncle to Mahomet; others for Kaïs, son of Saad; and others for Arabad, of the tribe of As. After a long dispute, they agreed to send a friend of Abdallah to him, a friend of Kaïs to Kaïs, and a friend of Arabad to Arabad, to try them all three, and to come and make their report to the assembly.

"Then the friend of Abdallah went and A nation so isolated, and whose blood said to him, 'Son of the uncle of Mahoremains unmixed, cannot change its cha-met, I am on a journey, and am destitute racter. The Arabs of the desert have always been given to robbery, and those inhabiting the towns been fond of fables, poetry, and astronomy.

It is said, in the historical preface to the Koran, that when any one of their tribes had a good poet, the other tribes never failed to send deputies to that one on which God had vouchsafed to bestow so great a gift.

The tribes assembled every year, by representatives, in an open place named Ocad, where verses were recited, nearly in the same way as is now done at Rome in the garden of the academy of the Arcadii; and this custom continued until the time of Mahomet. In his time, each one posted his verses on the door of the temple of Mecca.

Labid, son of Rabia, was regarded as the Homer of Mecca; but, having seen

of everything.' Abdallah was mounted on his camel loaded with gold and silk; he dismounted with all speed, gave him his camel, and returned home on foot.

"The second went and made application to his friend Kaïs, son of Saad. Kaïs was still asleep, and one of his domestics asked the traveller what he wanted. The traveller answered, that he was the friend of Kaïs, and needed his assistance. The domestic said to him, 'I will not wake my master; but here are seven thousand pieces of gold, which are all that we at present have in the house. Take also a camel from the stable, and a slave; these will, I think, be sufficient for you until you reach your own house.' When Kaïs awoke, he chid the domestic for not having given more.

"The third repaired to his friend Arabad, of the tribe of As. Arabad was blind,

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