Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/68



Rh the evil spirit is merely a fraction of the sufferer himself, it still remains a very evil fraction, which needs removal. Many such cases have been cured by hypnotism; and very likely the genuine exorcist was a hypnotizer. Such exorcisms as we find in unreformed service books sometimes excite our repulsion and contempt, especially those of the Eastern Churches; but there may be something more rational behind the notions that water or salt are inhabited by evil spirits.

'Powers' in general are certainly found in the biographies of many famous persons; exaggerated in ancient times, they have been shirked in modern, but they occur not least in the best attested biographies —down to the present year. There is, indeed, a much larger mass of carefully verified contemporary evidence of such faculties as second sight than is still generally realized. Of historic examples perhaps the most famous is Joan of Arc: there are few events in the past for which there is such thorough evidence—much of it in the careful records of a hostile board of judges—as her visions, her premonitions, her second sight; but, after all, these are really less remarkable exhibitions of 'supernatural powers' than the miracle of her achievement. Her life, from the beginning of her ministry to the end, was one beyond the powers not only of a peasant girl but of the ablest princes, and justifies her claim to be the agent of intelligences