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Rh when that wonderful excitement of the mind, when these gifts of prophecy associate themselves with this nullity, this chaos, and all the dark passions! Then eternal truth, which never slumbers within us, summons falsehood, vanity, pride, wickedness, and bloodthirstiness, to enter into the shadowed gloom of our dark deformed soul, hyenas and tigers then tear themselves free from their fetters, and hapless man imagines, while the spirit of murder is roaring within him, that the Spirit of the Lord is prophesying directly from out of his mouth."

Edmond looked at him searchingly. "Often, however," pursued the old man composedly, "it is only the Immortal Spirit, that collects all its present and future energies, that it may step beyond the ordinary limits of nature, and that it merely takes with it the images of folly, and the almost innocent mask, in order to announce even in the supernatural, that which is absurd and contrary to nature."