his letter is given by an exiled minister, bearing the equally suggestive name of Murat.
Passing over to Germany, we find that the contagion of new revelations and prophecies had spread itself in the eastern part of the empire at an earlier period in the 17th century. Temporarily with the mystical and hic- roglyphical system of Jacob Bohme, there sprang up in Silesia and Saxony the cognate revelations of Kotter, Drabitz, and Christina Poniatovia, all having a political rather than strictly religious character, and foretelling tlie final triumph of Protestantism in the empire, and tke regeneration of Christianity, by the overthrow of the Roman power. Kotter, fortunately for his head, escaped into Lusatia, where some noblemen of influence became his adherents. Drabitz, not so fortunate, lost his head at Presburg, by order of the emperor, to wliom his visions had a somewhat treasonable aspect; -while Poniatovia, more fortunate than either, closed her reve- lations by marrying the tutor of the son of the king of Bohemia, and the threefold revelations, though intro- duced with much pomp and circumstance, and with a vast number of curious illustrations of the dreams and visions in which they were disclosed, by the famous Amos Comenius, fell still-born on the world, and have now a place on the shelves of the curious, on the ground of their rarity and of the grotesque ingenuity of their pictorial representations. (Two editions of these rev- elations, both in 4to, appeared under the editorship of Comenius. The former is called Lux in Tenehris, the latter Lux e Tenebris. A copy of one of these was burned with Drabitz after he was beheaded at Pres- burg. Both editions are very rare.) In Western Ger- many they were almost unknown, and it is memorable that almost all the prophets and mystics of Central Eu- rope belonged to that mixed Teutonic and Sclavonic race which peoples the eastern frontier lands of the em- pire. But, though Germany contributed so little to the visionary lore of Europe at this period in a direct manner, it had produced a system of mystical divinity which laid the foundations of many future visions and ecstasies. The wild theology or theosophy, or what- ever else it might be called, of Jacob Bohme, was a fruitful soil for the gro^vth of new revelations and prophecies, and might well prepare the mind it ob- scured for the most startling apparitions of the beings of another world. The writings of this celebrated en- thusiast, forbidden and suppressed in his own country, found vent in Holland and England. The mysticism of Jane Leade (ii. v.) and her followers, the Philadel- jjhians (q. v), the Quietism of Molina (q. v.), are sub- jects for consideration in the article Mysticism. But it may not be amiss, in this place, to call attention to the singular contrast between the Roman Catholic miracles, visions, and revelations, and those of the Protestant world. Wliile the former are always invoked in order to found some ne^v• and undiscovered system of worship or object of superstition, the latter have a very practical end, and stand in close connection with holiness of life, which modern Roman revelations tend so little to pro- mote. Even Jane Leade's revelations had a really Christian moral, which cannot in any sense be affirmed of the Avonders of Lourdes or La Salette, and of the mir- acles with which, as Dr. Newman aflirined, the Roman Church is hung about on every side. "The Anglo- Saxon nature," says a writer in the British Quarterly Review (July, 1873, p. 97), " does not often indulge in visions, but when it does they seem to partake of that practical character which belongs to the race. No doubt some good may have arisen even from BIrs. Leade and her Philudelphian Society in its various branches in that age of spiritual deadness in which her lot was cast. Possibly even now we may be deriving some advantage from the example and the labors of this aged enthusi- ast, even as the decayed vegetation of an earlier year may have contributed to the fruit fulness of our own. The Philadelphian Society seems but a short time to I have survived its foundress, though the ramifications
MIRACLES, ECCLESIASTICAL 326
MIR^US
of it were so extended, and its temporary success so re- markable. But notwithstandinf/ the success of visiona- ries and pretenders to miraculous powers, both in medi- aral and modern times, it cannot be denied that the cur- rent offeelinij in the yeneral body of the Church has run strongly and steadily (lyainst their j)retensions, and that even those which had been attributed to a divine in- fluence in the bej^inning, liave often been referred to a diabolical inspiration in the end. Nor was this the only ]ieril to wliich miracle-mongers and visionaries ^ were exposed. So long as they fell in with the ruling j power, and flattered the prejudices or the tastes of the j day, all was well with them. St. Bridget, whose bitter , denunciations against the crimes of the court of Home | made her the popular saint of those who looked for tlicir reformation during the great schism, or who be- gan that difficult work at Constance, would have been handed over to Satan in the day when the ' Curia' was again restored in all its old deformity, and only pledged to a reform which it never attempted to carry out. Nicliolas Buhversdorf, whose revelations against Rome were uttered, unhappily for himself, in the Council of Basle, and were mixed up with the old heresy of the Millenarians, expiated for them at the stake; while the poor monk whose revelations and prophecies are men- tioned by the Dominican, Nyder, was found to have de- rived his inspiration, or, rather, his diabolic possession, from having swallowed the devil through greedily de- [ vouring a most tempting cauliflower in the garden of t the monastery without saying grace — ' avide comedit, ■ ac diemonem ignoranter deglutivit.' Another monk, ' who had a revelation which led him to found a new or- [ dcr, of which he assumed the government, incurred bodily as well as spiritual destruction — 'incineratus est rector cum regula.' The presumption of diabolic influ- ence was, however, not less decisive in Protestant Eng- land than in Home itself, and the grotesque history of the Sui-ey Deinoniack; or Satan's stninye ami dreadful Actions in and about the Person of Richard Duydale, in 1697, exhibits the popidar superstition in the fullest de- gree. Tills poor creature, who seems to have been an epileptic patient, fortunately escaped the Roman ordeal, for we read that he was ' dispossessed by (Jod's blessing on tlie fastings and prayers of divers ministers and peo- ple.' It had been well if tiie spiritual authorities of Lourdes and La Salette, instead of ' believing every spirit,' had ' dispossessed' the poor visionary peasants of their fond conceit, instead of instituting pilgrimages for tlie canonization of so foolish a story." Well miglit they have fallen back from the visions and miracles of a darker age upon that great and last revelation of God to man, those Scriptures of eternal truth, that '-pure and living precept of (iod's Word, which, witliout more additions, nay, with the forbidding of them, hath within itself the promise of eternal life, the end of all our wea- risome labors and all our sustaining hopes" (^lilton. On Prelaticul Epixcopanf). The question of ecclesiastical miracles was slightly touched by Spencer in his notes on Orif/en ayainst Cetsus, and more fully by Le Moine ; but did not attract general attention till Middleton pub- lished his famous Free Inquiry (1748). Several replies were written by Dodwcll (junior), Chapman, Church, etc., which do not seem to have attracted much perma- nent attention. Some good remarks on the general subject occur in Jortin's I'liiKirks on Ecclesiastical His- tory, and in Warburton's ./ulian. This controversy has also of late years been reopened by Dr. Newman, in an essay on miracles, originally prelixed to a transla- tion of Fleury's Kcclisiitstical History, and since repub- lished ill a separate form.