Of course the authorities took no notice of this affair. The teacher had the glass reset, and continued her school. Mr. Yorke wrote to Father Rasle, advising him not to return to Seaton for a while, and a lull succeeded.
And now the Yorkes took breath, and felt not quite alone, for Carl was coming home, and Dick Rowan would soon be there, and Captain Cary was coming down.
TO BE CONTINUED.
THE STIGMATA AND ECSTASIES OF LOUISE LATEAU OF BOIS D’HAINE.
Since the days of St. Francis of Assisium, whose life in the thirteenth century was one constant succession of marvels, the occasional appearance upon favored individuals of the stigmata,[45] and the occurrence of ecstatic visions, have excited the deepest interest in devout minds.
To the eye of faith, these departures from the ordinary laws of nature, like the miracles which God has vouchsafed in all ages of the church, have seemed fresh and brilliant illustrations of this divine power. To the purely scientific mind they have presented inexplicable phenomena, which, being irreconcilable with natural laws, have been either openly derided or attributed to pious fraud.
Nor can the physiologist be harshly blamed for scepticism in this direction, for history teems with the records of epidemics of religious enthusiasm, in which fanaticism had led its victims to claim repeated ecstatic visions of God, and to be the recipients of supernatural revelations. The descriptions transmitted to us of the Pietists and Illuminati in Germany, of the French and English Shakers, the Welsh Jumpers, and many others of the sects to which the Reformation gave birth, abound in instances of these ecstatic outbreaks.
The visions of Swedenborg, as related in his Arcana Cœlestia, and in the numerous biographies[46] of this extraordinary person, are well known; and among similar claimants to supernatural experience, Arnold’s description of John Engelbrecht[47] is one of the most curious and interesting.