Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/238

224 of the normal self by a mass of well co-ordinated ideas suggested by the shrieks and antics of the possessed. It finds an almost perfect parallel in the experience of Mr. R. L. Stevenson, which I narrated in my last paper.

In a letter to a friend, Father Surin says : "Matters have come to such a pass that God has permitted, on account of my sins I suppose, something which has perhaps never before been seen in the Church. During the exercise of my ministry the devil passes from the body of the person possessed and, entering into mine, throws me down, convulses me, visibly passes through me, keeping possession of me many hours as a demoniac. . . . I do not know how to express to you what then takes place within me; and how that spirit unites with mine without depriving me either of consciousness or of my soul's freedom, yet acting all the while like another self, and as if I had two souls, of which the one is deprived of its body and of the use of its organs, and stands aside looking on the one that has got in. . . . The two spirits struggle in the same field, that is my body, and the soul is as it were divided. One part of it is the subject of diabolic impressions; another, of the motions which are proper to it, or which God gives it. . . . I feel that the cries which spring from my lips come equally from these two souls, and I can scarcely discriminate whether it is joy [allégresse] that gives rise to them or the extreme excitement [fureur] that fills me. . . . While my body rolls on the ground and the ministers of the Church talk to me as to a devil and heap maledictions upon me, I can not tell you what joy then fills me, having become a devil, not by rebellion against God, but by the misfortune which simply but clearly portrays to me the state to which sin has brought me. . . . My condition is such that I have few free actions; when I wish to speak, my speech is arrested; at mass I am stopped short; at table I can not raise food to my mouth; at confession I suddenly forget my sins, and I feel the devil come and go within me as in his own house. . . . As soon as I wake he is there, at my prayers; he takes away my thought when he pleases, when my heart begins to open to God he fills it with rage, he puts me to sleep when I wish to be awake, and openly, by the mouths of the possessed, he boasts that he is my master."

A parallel case is given by Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, in his Appendix (page 58) to the second edition of Joseph Glanvil's book, "Saducismus Triumphatus, or, Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions," London, 1682. It is entitled, "A story of the marvelous condition of one Robert Churchman of Balsham, some six or seven Miles off from