In the time of the apostles there was no ritual, no liturgy; there were no fixed hours for assembling, no ceremonies. The disciples baptized the catechumens, and breathed the Holy Ghost into their mouths, as Jesus Christ had breathed on the apostles; and as, in many churches, it is still the custom to breathe into the mouth of a child when administering baptism. Such were the beginnings of Christianity. All was done by inspiration—by enthusiasm, as among the Therapeutæ and the Judaïtes, if we may for a moment be permitted to compare Jewish societies, now become reprobate, with societies conducted by Jesus Christ Himself from the highest heaven, where He sat at the right hand of His Father. Time brought necessary changes; the Church being extended, strengthened, and enriched, had occasion for new laws.
APPARITION.
It is not at all uncommon for a person under strong emotion to see that which is not. In 1726 a woman in London, accused of being an accomplice in her husband's murder, denied the fact; the dead man's coat was held up and shaken before her, her terrified imagination presented the husband himself to her view; she fell at his feet and would have embraced 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 between 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 deigned to employ these apparitions—these visions—in favor of the Jews, who were then its cherished people.
It may be that, in the course of time, some really pious souls, deceived by their enthusiasm, have believed that they had received from an intimate communication with God that which they owed only to their inflamed imaginations. In such cases there is need of the advice of an honest man, and especially of a good physician.
The stories of apparitions are innumerable. It is said to have been in consequence 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.