Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/786

768 asserts that he is now seventy-two years of age, but that God had assured him, through the mouth of the Virgin, that his eyes shall see the salvation of France, and that he shall not die until these predictions have been fulfilled. That such crass superstition should be made the means of political propagandism in the last decade of the nineteenth century is certainly a strange phenomenon.

Another book indicating the rank growth of superstition in recent times is Dr. Theobald Bischofberger's Die Verwaltung des Exorcistats nach Massgabe des römischen Benediktionale, of which a new edition, revised and enlarged, was published by Roth at Stuttgart in 1893. The author evidently prides himself upon his powers as an exorcist, and relates with great unction and assurance his experiences in casting out devils by a hocus-pocus worthy of an American medicine-man or an African conjurer. In the section of his manual entitled Recognition of Demoniac Diseases he states that the signs of diabolical possession are quite conspicuous, but not altogether infallible, such as understanding foreign tongues without having learned them, and revealing the place where objects have been hidden, a peculiar faculty now known as mind-reading. Some persons thus affected are subject to fits of fainting; others shake and shiver as though they had the ague; others break out into profuse perspiration, or are seized with an irrepressible tendency to yawn, often developing into chronic oscitation. Sometimes the symptoms are imperceptible to the observer, as when the patient complains of internal heat, or suffers from constriction of the head, confusion of ideas, roaring in the ears, and similar troubles. Dr. Bischofberger admits that disorders produced by demons are difficult to distinguish from those due to natural causes. Thus the paroxysms of an epileptic who is diabolically possessed do not differ from those of an epileptic who has anæmia of the brain or other cerebral affection. The sensations of the aura epileptica and the convulsions that follow them are the same, whatever may be their origin. There is, however, one sure means of determining whether a disease is demoniac or not—namely, the use of the præceptum probativum or exorcismus probationis, by which the demon or demons, if there are several of them, are commanded in the name of Jesus to give a clear and manifest sign of their presence, and, if they have any power over this creature of God in his sickness, to agitate him and do the same things in the presence of the exorcist that they have been wont to do in his absence: Præcipio tibi dæmon, vel vobis dæmonibus, si plures sitis, in nomine Jesu, ut mihi aliquod signum evidens et manifestum faciatis vestriæ præsentiæ, si aliquam potestatem habeatis in hanc creaturem Dei in hac ejus in ægrotatione, agitando earn vel coram me aliquid ex iis faciendo,