“ In some sense of the supernatural, in some faith in the unseen, in some feeling that man is not of this world, in some grasp on the Eternal God, and on an eternal, supernatural, and supersensuous life, lies the basis of all pity and mercy, all help and comfort and patience and sympathy among men. Set these aside, commit us only to the natural, to what our eyes see and our hands handle; and while we may organize society scientifically, and live according to ‘the laws of nature,’ and be very philosophical and very liberal, we are standing on the ground on which every pack of wolves gallops. ”

“ If, again, the only evidence that a person will admit is that of his own personal experience, that he must himself witness a miracle; that, like S. Thomas, he will maintain, “Except I shall see ... I will not believe,” has he not power of mind enough to appreciate the fact that he is in every way unreasonable, by demanding for himself that which he altogether refuses to admit in others? ”

“ And though the very name of witchcraft be now held in contempt, and the supposition of communion with evil spirits scouted as a fable of what are called the dark ages, we own that we have difficulty in believing that all which has passed by the names of magic and sorcery may be resolved into sleight of hand, deception, and trick. The visible world and the invisible are in very close contact: there is, indeed, a veil on our eyes, preventing our gazing on spiritual beings and things, but we doubt not that whatsoever passes upon earth is open to the view of higher and immaterial creatures. ”

“ Now in this revelation, given in its fullness by the Eternal Word, and bequeathed to the Christian Church, to be preserved and handed down for future generations, all is Supernatural. That body of doctrine which Christians believe, divinely guarded by the Church, was announced beforehand, centuries ere it was actually delivered, by a wisdom above nature—the divine light of prophecy. When it was set forth by the Eternal Word, its truth was attested in the face of a hostile people by a power above nature, whose word Creation obeyed, as in regularity, so in marked and palpable change. ”

“ If thou hast deceived man, God thou canst not scoff: One expels thee, from Whose Sight nothing is hidden. He casts thee out, to Whose power all things are subject. He shuts thee out, Who hast prepared for thee and for thine angels everlasting hell; out of Whose mouth the sharp sword shall go out, when He shall come to judge the quick and the dead, and the World by fire. ”

“ One may safely say, ‘If you will show me, on any principle of naturalism, or any rule of what you shallowly in these days call ‘philosophy,’ on any law of nature, why I should not strangle my deaf and dumb child, smother my paralytic father, or drown my hopelessly insane wife, then I will turn materialist also.’ We are far from believing that these gentlemen know how they have been undermining the foundations of civilized and social life. ”

“ And when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped Him, and cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the Most High God? I adjure Thee by God that Thou torment me not. For He said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And He asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion, for we are many. And he besought Him much that He would not send him away out of the country. Now there was nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. ”

“ We gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of Divine revelation. Whilst we retain pure and unimpaired the treasure of Christian morality, we relinquish nothing but the debasing elements added to it by human superstition. We are no longer bound to believe a theology which outrages reason and moral sense. ”

“ Now, to go a step further, all human efforts to find out God have been the result of the combination of ideas gleaned from human experience. These ideas have often enough been grotesque, fanciful, and distorted—a judgment which will be admitted to be accurate by all Christian people; whether the gross conceptions of Pagan mythology or the nebulous speculations of modern “thinkers” are brought under consideration. That man, the created, cannot understand God the Creator—that the thing made cannot compass the Maker—is not only perfectly certain, but necessary. ”

“ In these days of shallowness and scepticism, men pride themselves on calling everything into question, as if they proved their claim to wisdom according to the measure of their unbelief. But those who dive a little deeper into things will not be so ready to admit the claims of modern insolent writers. They will find that our ancestors had heads as sound, judgments as cool and unprejudiced, at least, as any of these moderns; and the more they examine, the more reasons will they find for attaching weight to their testimony. ”

“ Freely, and for a lofty purpose, to set forth His glory, power, and mercy, He created the laws of nature; freely, and for a like lofty purpose, He sometimes suspends them. Such intervention on His part, such a suspension, is a miracle, which may be defined as “a record and evidence of the Supernatural manifesting itself in the midst of the natural order;” or, as S. Thomas Aquinas so clearly and ably defined it of old, “A miracle is an act performed by God out of the ordinary course of nature.” ”

“ Hear therefore, and fear, Satan, thou injurer of the faith, thou enemy of the human race, thou procurer of death, thou destroyer of life, kindler of vices, seducer of men, betrayer of the nations, inciter of envy, origin of avarice, cause of discord, stirrer-up of troubles: why standest thou, and resistest, when thou knowest that Christ the Lord destroyest thy ways? ”

“ For which respect, though I dare not say I can give a perfect definition in this matter, which is hard to do even in known things, because the essential form is hard to be found, yet I do give a definition which may at the least give notice and make known what manner of persons they be of whom I am to speak:—A witch is one that worketh by the Devil, or by some devilish or curious art, either hurting or healing, revealing things secret, or foretelling things to come, which the Devil hath devised to entangle and snare men’s souls withal unto damnation. ”

“ Thirdly, the Devil, through hatred both of God and man, strives in every way to substitute himself for God in this World. He is the Prince of the Powers of the air. He is stronger and more knowing than man. ”

“ In surrendering its miraculous element and its claims to supernatural origin, therefore, the religion of Jesus does not lose its virtue, or the qualities which have made it a blessing to humanity. It sacrifices none of that elevated character which has distinguished and raised it above all human systems: it merely relinquishes a claim which it has shared with all antecedent religions, and severs its connection with ignorant superstition. It is too divine in its morality to require the aid of miraculous attributes. ”

“ From the amount of evidence which exists, it is impossible to deny that such a power as Witchcraft has been frequently exercised, and consequently may be put into practice again. It is idle to assert that it is a mere moral epidemic, at least for those who take up a Christian standing-point, and do not deny both the Inspiration of Holy Scripture and the Indefectibility and Infallibility of the Church Universal, as well as, and in addition to, well-authenticated historical facts. The practice of Witchcraft has, of course, been more ordinary in countries which are not Catholic ”

“ Thou art the accused of Jesus Christ our Lord, whom thou hast dared to tempt, and presumed to crucify. Thou art the accused of the human race, to whom by thy persuasion thou hast given to drink thy poison. ”

“ Just as under the laws of Nature and the written law given by Moses, the Almighty was pleased to illustrate the society of His chosen servants with frequent miracles, so we are led to expect that the One Family of God should be for ever distinguished by occasional miracles wrought in and through her, as a standing proof of her divine origin and as a guide to the wanderers beyond the confines of her fold. ”

“ By the very act of his profession the Christian allows the co-existence in the World of two distinct and separable orders,—the Natural, which governs the physical and moral laws of the world, and the Supernatural, which, according to God’s Revelation, gradually unfolded and duly developed, governs the moral laws of man. The object of man’s faith is mystery, certain in itself, but above human intelligence. ”

“ For, as is well known, the general thought and conscience of mankind have believed in a God, semper et ubique, everywhere and at all times. Thus a thing may exist, and its existence may be perfectly patent to the understanding; and furthermore its existence may be worthy of implicit belief; while, at the same time, the thing itself may be found to transcend and overpass the limited powers of man’s intellect. ”

“ O God, the Creator and Protector of the human race, Who hast formed man in Thine own Image: look upon this Thy servant N. (or this Thy handmaid N.) , who is grievously vexed with the wiles of an unclean spirit, whom the old adversary, the ancient enemy of the earth, encompasses with a horrible dread, and blinds the senses of his human understanding with stupor, confounds him with terror, and harasses him with trembling and fear. ”

“ For what modest person would venture to maintain his own experience to be altogether and absolutely firm and unalterable? Who would declare of a witness, who testified, for example, what was contrary to that experience, that such a man was worthy only of disbelief and derision? And yet many, in the present day, adopt and put into practice this unstable and imperfect theory of Hume. ”

“ It is often quite impossible to trace the manner in which, or the method by which, dreams arise; and certainly many of the facts connected with them do not appear referable to any coherent principle with which it may truly be said that man is perfectly acquainted. They are mysterious; they are strange; they are supernatural. At the same time it is impossible not to remember how frequently the sacred and divine writings record examples of dreams, by which the Will of God was directly made known of old to some of His favoured servants. ”

“ Ancient Rome owned the Crucified as a Monarch conquering and to conquer. His Revelation, of the truth of which there shall be witnesses unto the end, is above nature, in that it alone provides adequate remedies for the manifold infirmities of the human race. The life it produces here is supernatural, as are also the means by which that life is created, and the efficient gifts by which it is being constantly renewed. Supernatural, too, is the work of the Holy Ghost, wrought out by human agents and human instrumentality ”

“ O God, Whose property is ever to have mercy and to forgive: receive our supplications and prayers, that of Thy mercy and loving-kindness Thou wilt set free this Thy servant (or handmaid) who is fast bound by the chain of his sins. ”

“ He yields the homage of his will not only to a God Who is the Great Creator and Preserver of the world and of all that therein is, but renders it to a God Who is the Repairer and Restorer of the human race by the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, and the Sanctifier of souls. ”

“ If it has spoken, let us bow with all the respect due to grave and mature ecclesiastical judgments, even where they are not clothed with infallible authority; if it has not spoken, let us not be of those who reject everything in a partizan spirit, and want to impose this unbelief upon everybody; nor of those who admit everything lightly, and want alike to impose their belief; let us be careful in discussing a particular fact, not to reject the very principle of the Supernatural, but neither let us shut our eyes to the evidence of testimony ”

“ Thus, when the head of a family becomes old or borders on childishness, the son, by going through the proposed legal formality, may stand by and witness the poisoning of his father, and so enter on the possession of his property. When a mother becomes old, the daughter may assist in a similar manner at her mother’s death. A crippled child, a weak-minded relation, an infirm member of the family, according to the “philosophers,” should have a poisonous drug efficiently administered; that so the weak, crippled, or imbecile might be murdered and put out of the way. ”

“ The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, each and all (as Christian experience by temptation testifies,) effect this most successfully.
The World, which has been defined as “the rebellion of the reason against God,” scorns to accept miracles and mysteries, and boldly denies the existence both of angels and fallen spirits—scoffing at and repudiating the idea of Witchcraft or Necromancy, which it craftily characterizes as “the foolish and ignorant superstitions of a dark age.” ”

“ If there be no supernatural basis of life, if the supernatural have no real existence, if man be of the earth earthy, if he be only an outgrowth of the dumb forces of matter (the first article of the creed of these “philosophers”) , if he be governed solely and altogether, absolutely and completely by an inexorable material law (the highest and the only law, as [Pg 13] they would have us believe) , then, of course, their conclusion inevitably follows—that it is both merciful and wise to put a man out of his misery when he becomes a burden both to himself and his friends. ”

“ Now the purport of this volume is to show by examples of supernatural intervention—examples many of which have been gathered from quite recent periods—that Almighty God, from time to time, in various ways and by different human instruments, still condescendingly reveals to man glimpses of the world unseen, and shows the existence of that life beyond the grave, in which the sceptic and materialist of the present restless age would have us disbelieve, and which they themselves scornfully reject. ”

“ To the humble observer of the ways of Divine Providence, enough occurs every day to prepare him for any manifestation of the Power of God: not to say that there is not a state in Christendom in which, even in our own times, many wonderful miracles have not taken place. Witness the glorious appearance of a vast cross of fire in the heavens at Migné, near Poictiers in France, in the year 1826, in the month of December, an event which was attested on oath before the bishop of the diocese by several thousand eye-witnesses. ”

“ Strange as it may seem, it is no less strange than true; and mournful as the circumstance is in itself, those who believe in the efficacy of dreams as prognosticators of future events, will perhaps derive some gratification from it. On Sunday night Mrs. Perry (who resides at Melrose-cottage, Heath-street, Canton) , had a dream, which but too faithfully predicted the sad tragedy of yesterday. In the midst of her sleep she saw, to use her own words, a large crowd following her husband down the Cowbridge-road, in the direction of the Westgate hotel, where the murder was committed. ”

“ Here, in the province of a Revelation, not man’s conception of God, but God Himself is set forth. Not so unlike ourselves is He that we find Him, with will, actions, and purposes, unintelligible; but, [Pg 6] using analogies gathered and systematized by experience, we learn, at the same time, that our Creator is beyond the range both of thought and language—never to be fully known, until, with divinely-illuminated faculties in a higher state, we see Him face to face. ”