Tertullian, and many others, have argued the notion of a special purpose of the Deity in every dream. And the “New Moral World” of the visionary Owen, asserts, that “one chief source of our knowledge is dreams and omens.”
In the eras of inspiration, few will be sceptical enough to doubt the occurrence of divine mediations; or not to believe, with Socrates, and other sages, in the divine origin of dreams and omens.
The evidence of Holy Scripture again proves the occasion, indeed the necessity, for such communication; but, in our own time, I deem it little less than profaneness, to imagine that the Deity should indicate the future occurrence of common-place and trivial incidents through the medium of an organ, confessedly in a state of imperfection, at the moment when the faculties of mind are returning from a state of temporary suspension,—a death-like sleep.
Even John Wesley believed dreams to be “doubtful and disputable;” and adds, with a half-profanation,—“they might be from God, or might not.”
The Emperor Constantine, you know, denounced death to all who dared to look seriously into the secrets of futurity.
When we reflect that the proportion of events, seemingly the fulfilment of a dream, is to the myriads of forebodings which never come to pass (as the dreams recorded with some solemnity by Herodotus, of Alcibiades; of Crœsus, regarding his son Atys; of Astyages and the vine; of Cambyses, respecting Smerdis; and of Hamilcar, at the siege of Syracusa;) as a drop in the ocean, the fallacy of the doctrine must be evident. I marvel much that credulity, in this reflecting age, can gain a single proselyte.
The magi of Persia and the soothsayers of Greece and Rome were constantly in error; and Artemidorus Miraldus, who in the reign of Antoninus wrote his voluminous book “Oneirocriticus,” has given us the most ridiculous interpretations.
When the pagan priesthood of old lay down on the reeking skins of their victims to rouse the inspiration of their dreams, it was to cheat their proselytes. Such were the mummeries in the Temple of Æsculapius. The devotees were first purified by the “lustral water;” and then divine visions came over them, and priestesses in snowy robes, and a venerable priest in the habit of Æsculapius, paraded round the altar, and the charm was complete.
You may learn from Martin something about the modern influence of such a charm.
“Mr. Alexander Cooper, present minister of North-uist, told me that one John Erach, in the Isle of Lewis, assured him that it was his fate to have been led by his curiosity to some who consulted this oracle, and that he was a night within the hide as above mentioned, during which time he felt and heard such terrible things that he could not express them; the impression it made on him was such as could never go off, and he said for a thousand worlds he would never again be concerned in the like performance, for this had disordered him to a high degree. He confessed it ingenuously and with an air of great remorse, and seemed to be very penitent under a just sense of so great a crime: he declared this about five years since, and is still living in the Lewis for any thing I know.”