Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/626

606 craving for sympathy finds a deep response in the highest development of hope—religion; and the sufferings of this life are assuaged by the assurance of sympathy and aid from Heaven, and of a blessed future where suffering and sorrow are no more.

"Again, when religious emotion develops itself in delusions, another element of character comes into play. Vanity and egotism give shape and form to his dreams and fancies. When cut off by sleep or epileptic trance from communication with the outer world through the senses, the ever-waking mind operates on the stores which memory has hoarded, and works up those wonderful visions in which the most exaggerated egotism find gratification in interviews with the Almighty, direct communications with the Saviour, or revelations as to the salvations of the human race."

Several remarkable instances are related in which devout feeling, offering the strongest evidences of genuineness, coexisted with the most dangerous forms of homicidal violence. A young man, aged twenty-seven, subject to irregular epileptic fits, read his Bible attentively, and showed a strongly devotional frame of mind. While in the asylum, he wrote a very earnest letter to the clergyman of the village church, asking to be permitted to partake of the sacrament, and was allowed to do so; "yet only a few weeks afterward he nearly killed a fellow-patient—a poor, demented creature—because he called him a Fenian, and his conduct continues to this day a singular jumble of piety and vice.

"When actual religious delusions are present in epileptics, these are generally founded on visions occurring during a state of trance, but sometimes, as in the following case, the delusion continues after the memory of the vision on which it was founded has faded. The case is curious, not only from the nature of the delusions, but from the fact that the subject of them was a boy only thirteen years old, and epileptic from infancy. On admission to the asylum he spoke with an earnestness, and, granting his premises, and intelligence beyond his years. When questioned as to his previous life in the Garden of Eden, he replied that he had been so long dead that he could not be expected to recall particulars, but added that it was perfectly true that he had eaten the forbidden fruit, and when asked why he had done so, he replied: 'It's all very well to blame me; but you would just have done the same thing if you had been in my place.' He pointed to a picture of a woman on the wall, which he said was the portrait of Eve. He says he has been in heaven, and describes what he saw there. He takes fits every two or three weeks, and on recovering from them he is dull and stupid; then he becomes possessed of some extravagant delusions, always of a religious nature. Sometimes he returns to his old delusion that he is Adam, sometimes he is God, at other times Christ, and not unfrequently the devil. When