The secret of the sects : a few words on mesmerism, psychomancy, etc. : a caution for the times.

Date:
[1882?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The secret of the sects : a few words on mesmerism, psychomancy, etc. : a caution for the times. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    draw away disciples after them {Ads xx. 30), seem to have been men who possessed extraordinary magnetic powers, and, in many cases, to have been but the chief agents or tools of some previously existing conspiracy against the Catholic Church. Was not this evidently the case with the chief author of the Reformation,—Luther himself? We need not attach any importance to his own boast, At first I stood alone, for, as Bossuet observed :— A still greater apostasy [than that of the Albigenses and Waldenses] Jiadbeen Jiatching by means of those Sects. The world, teeming with animosity, brings forth Luther and Calvin [Hist, of the Variat., b. xi. ch. 205). Who has not heard of Luther's colloquies with the Devil,—his statement that the Devil lay nearer to him than his wife Catherine—and of the lengthy discussion, gravely reported by himself, that he had with him, and by which he was argued out of his belief in the efficacy of the Sacrifice of the Mass? (See Bossuet, Hist, of the Var., B. iv. ch. 17). Michelet, in his Life of LutJier, fills many pages with the details regarding these matters, in Luther's own words. All such delusions are perfectly intelligible on the supposition that Luther was subject to, and excited by, the magnetic influence of some secret Sect or Society (the history of several other Reformers and their fanatical followers would furnish many similar instances) ; and probably no one who has read the works on Mesmerism and other occult agencies that have been written by Dr. Gregory of Edinburgh, Dr. Herbert Mayo, Professor Zerffi, and others, would have any hesitation about adopting that explanation of them. Of the celebrated SwEDENBORG, the late German divine Gorres observed, that his ecstasies may be best explained by Animal Magnetism (Mohler's Symbolism, vol. ii. p. 273); and probably the speaking in unknown tongues and pro- phesying, to which pretensions have been made by the Irvingites, Shakers, and some other Protestant Sects, may all be accounted for in the same manner. The reader will hardly need to be reminded of the extraordinary psychical results which often attended the adoption of Methodism in its early participation of a number ofpersons in one thought he mentions instances in which companies of Mesmerists have silently .and mentally driven subjects that were agreed upon into the minds of persons quite unconscious of being so experimented upon, but whose minds were actually influenced in the way designed.