Tliough the churches of the Keformation, in their bold appeal "to the law and to the testimony," had treateil the visions and miracles upon which the in- ner power of liome had been built with as little cere- mony as they treate<l the forged decretals on whicU her external jiower liad been carried up in tlie darkness of the ]Middle Ages, it was not long before the old love of the marvellous, and the inextinguishal)le longing after the forbidden fruit of visions and revelations which had been so abundantly enjoyed but a little before, extended into the cliurches of the Beformatiou. But the occa- sion of their appearance was difTerent altogetlier from that which had evoked it in the Koman Churcii, though by a singular coincidence the scene of the Protestant and of tiie Komisli revelations was the same. The province of Daupliiny, wliich gave a birthplace to the peasant visionaries of La .Salette, w.as also, in an earlier day, the native cuintry of Isabel Vincent, whose mirac- ulous preachings in her sleep and ecstatic visions en- listed the faitli of tlic good and learned il. Jurieu, and produced-from him an energetic and not ineloipient ap- peal in behalf of modern miracles. The very title of his treatise in its Knglish dress is almost as sensational as a novel of Miss Braddon : T/ie liejh'ctions <fthe rer- erend and learned M. Jurieu upon the stranf/e and mi- raculous L'cslasies of Isabel Vincent, the Shejikerdess, of
MIRACLES, ECCLESIASTICAL 325 MIRACLES, ECCLESIASTICAL
Saon, in Dauphine, who ever since February last hath I sung Psalms, prayed, preached, and prophesied about the present Times in her Trances ; as also iqjon the wonder- fid and porte7itous TrumjKtings and singing of Psalms that were heard by thousands in the air in many Parts of France in the Year 1686. Not nursed into life in the bosom of Rome, and nourislied as the visions of Loiirdes and La Salette by a priesthood too deeply in- terested in the success of the imposition, the Protestant wonders sprang into a vigorous and sturdy existence out of the terrible hot-bed of cruelty and persecution which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had pro- duced in every province of France, and which, in the more imaginative -region of the south, bore strange and exotic fruits. The visions of the poor shepherdess and her preachings were little more, in fact, than the broken and wild recollections of the Protestant services then so cruelly prohibited — prophecies of future trials or deliv- erances being intermingled with her sermons in the same manner as they had doubtless been by the exiled and often martyred pastors of that period of bitter per- secution, whose judgment, " though of a long time," was read in the dreadful anarchy of the first Revolution, and seems hardly fully ended in our own day.
The crushing out of a rational faith was followed by the rise of the school of Voltaire and Diderot, and it ^vell might shame the advocates of the Church of Rome in every age to find that the proscribed infidel was the first to bring to justice, or, rather, to public reprobation, the judges who, at the instigation of the Jesuits, so hor- ribly tortured and murdered the poor silk-mercer of Toulouse, Galas, whose only crime, like that of the vic- tims of Thorn in a somewhat earlier day, was his firm and consistent Protestantism. The wonderful sounds in the air — which were testified by so many thousands, and described in a public letter by M. de Besse, a pastor who had contrived to escape from his prison to Lau- sanne— might perhaps be referred, without charge of scepticism, to the effects of this dreadful persecution upon the minds and the nerves of its wretched and homeless victims, of whom it might well be said, in the words of Paul, " They were slain with the sword ; they wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented, they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens, and in caves of the earth." Indeed, some even imagined, as M. de Besse teUs us, that the wonderful sounds Avhich were heard by so many were but the singing of the poor exiles met together in woods or in caves ; but the variety of pk in which he himself heard these mysterious harmonies soon convinced him that so simple a solution of them was erroneous. In vain the ear-witnesses of these phe- nomena were taken to prison for declaring them, and forbidden to say anything about them again. The wit- nesses multiplied more and more. Sometimes the sounds were like those of a trumpet, and had a warlike charaC' ter ; at other times they are described as combining the most ravishing strains of harmony ; sometimes they were heard by day, sometimes, again, at night, " but in the night in a more clear and distinct manner than in the day" (Jurieu, Reflections, p. 36). "The trumpet alwaj'S sounds as if an army were going to charge, and the harmony is like the composition of many voices, and of an infinite number of musical instruments." " I do believe," adds the good pastor, who found it more easy to interpret the sign than to account for it, " that the trumpet is a sign of a cruel war that will be made in a little time, and that the harmonj^ comes from the mouth of angels, who, to put our enemies to the last confusion, thunder out the praises of God at a time when these wretched men forbid it to reformed Chris tians." The outbreak of the French Revolution, and the overthrow of the Church just a century after, would seem to verify, though at a later date, the interpreta tion of the poor exile, whose fellow-witness was a '• Sieur Calas," probably one of the family of the martyr of a kter day ; while the testimony to the authenticity of