Dr. Ennemoser, in his very learned work on magic, shows us that all the phenomena of magnetism and somnambulism, and all the various kinds of divination, have been known and practised in every country under the sun; and have been intimately connected with, and indeed may be traced up to the fountain-head of every religion.
What are the limits of these powers possessed by us while in the flesh—how far they may be developed—and whether, at the extreme verge of what we can effect, we begin to be aided by God or by spirits of other spheres of existence bordering on ours—we know not; but, with respect to the morality of these practices, it suffices that what is good in act or intention, must come of good; and what is evil in act or intention, must come of evil: which is true now, as it was in the time of Moses and the prophets, when miracles and magic were used for purposes holy and unholy, and were to be judged accordingly. God works by natural laws, of which we yet know very little, and, in some departments of his kingdom, nothing; and whatever appears to us supernatural, only appears so from our ignorance; and whatever faculties or powers he has endowed us with, it must have been designed we should exercise and cultivate for the benefit and advancement of our race: nor can I for one moment suppose that, though like everything else, liable to abuse, the legitimate exercise of these powers, if we knew their range, would be useless, much less pernicious or sinful.
Of the magical power of will, as I have said before, we know nothing; and it does not belong to a purely rationalistic age to acknowledge what it can not understand. In all countries men have arisen, here and there, who have known it, and some traces of it have survived both in language and in popular superstitions. “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, ‘Remove hence,’ and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you. Howbeit, this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” And, veuillez et croyez—will and believe—was the solution Puységur gave of his magical cures; and no doubt the explanation of those affected by royal hands is to be found in the fact that they believed in themselves; and having faith, they could exercise will. But, with the belief in the divine right of kings, the faith and the power would naturally expire together.
With respect to what Christ says, in the above-quoted passage, of fasting, numerous instances are extant, proving that clear-seeing and other magical or spiritual powers are sometimes developed by it.
Wilhelm Krause, a doctor of philosophy and a lecturer at Jena, who died during the prevalence of the cholera, cultivated these powers and preached them. I have not been able to obtain his works, they being suppressed as far as is practicable by the Prussian government. Krause could leave his body, and, to all appearance, die whenever he pleased. One of his disciples, yet living, Count von Eberstein, possesses the same faculty.
Many writers of the sixteenth century were well acquainted with the power of will, and to this was attributed the good or evil influence of blessings and curses. They believed it to be of great effect in curing diseases, and that by it alone life might be extinguished. That, subjectively, life may be extinguished, we have seen by the cases of Colonel Townshend, the dervish that was buried, Hermotinus, and others: for doubtless the power that could perform so much, could, under an adequate motive, have performed more: and since all things in nature, spiritual and material, are connected, and that there is an unceasing interaction between them, we being members of one great whole, only individualized by our organisms, it is possible to conceive that the power which can be exerted on our own organism might be extended to others: and since we can not conceive man to be an isolated being—the only intelligence besides God—none above us and none below—but must, on the contrary, believe that there are numerous grades of intelligences, it seems to follow, of course, that we must stand in some kind of relation to them, more or less intimate; nor is it at all surprising that with some individuals this relation should be more intimate than with others. Finally, we are not entitled to deny the existence of this magical or spiritual power, as exerted by either incorporated or unincorporated spirits, because we do not comprehend how it can be exerted; since, in spite of all the words that have been expended on the subject, we are equally ignorant of the mode in which our own will acts upon our own muscles. We know the fact, but not the mode of it.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CONCLUSION.
Of the power of the mind over matter, we have a remarkable example in the numerous well-authenticated instances of the stigmata. As in most cases this phenomenon has been connected with a state of religious exaltation, and has been appropriated by the Roman church as a miracle, the fact has been in this country pretty generally discredited, but without reason. Ennemoser, Passavent, Schubert, and other eminent German physiologists, assure us that not only is the fact perfectly established, as regards many of the so-called saints, but also that there have been indubitable modern instances, as in the case of the ecstaticas of the Tyrol, Catherine Emmerich (commonly called the Nun of Dulmen), Maria Morl, and Domenica Lazzari, who have all exhibited the stigmata.