2. Used as the Greek word is by Luke (Acts, ttt sup.) "the physician," and, in this special sense,. by him only, ill the New Test., it would be interesting to inquire what precise meaning it had in the medical terminology of the time. From the time of Hippocrates, who uses it to describe the loss of conscious pcrcciition, it had prob- ably borne the counotaiion which it has had, with shades of meaning for good or evil, ever since. Thus, Hesychiiis gives as the account of a man in an ecstasy that he is o ti'c iavruv fjt) wf. Apuleius (Apul(j//ia) speaks of it as "a change from the earthly mind (('nrij TO)i yifivnv <ppovi]ftaToc) to a divine and spiritual con- dition both of character and life." Tertulliau (Z>e An.
45) compares it to the dream-state in which the soul acts, but not through its usual instruments. Augustine {Cunfess. lyi, 11) describes his mother in this state as "abstracta a prssentibus," and gives a description of like phenomena in the case of a certain Kestitutus {De Vie. Dei, xiv, 24).
3. We may compare with these statements the more precise delinitions of modern medical science. There the ecstatic state appears as one form of catalepsy. In catalejisy pure and simple, there is "a sudden suspen- sion of thought, of sensibility, of voluntary' motion." "The body continues in any attitude in which it may be placed ;" there are no signs of any process of thought ; the patient continues silent. In the ecstatic form of catalepsy, on the other hand, "the patient is lost to all external impressions, but wrapt and absorbed in some object of the imagination." The man is "as if out of the body." "Nervous and susceptible persons are apt to be tiirown into these trances under the influence of what is called mesmerism. There is, for the most part, a high degree of mental excitement. The patient ut- ters the most enthusiastic and fervid ex])ressions or the most earnest warnings. The character of the whole frame is that of intense contemplative excitement. He believes that he has seen wonderful visions and heard singular revelations" (Watson, Principles and Practice, lect. xxxix ; Copland, Diet, (^f Medicine, s. v. " Catalep- sy"). The causes ofthis state are to be traced common- ly to strong religious impressions ; but some, though, for the most part, not the ecstatic, phenomena of catalepsy are producible by the concentration of thought on one object, or of the vision upon one fixed point ( Quart. Rev. xciii, 510-22, by Dr. Carpenter ) ; and, in some more exceptional cases, like that mentioned by Augus- tine (there, however, under the influence of sound, "ad imitatas quasi lamentantis cujuslibet hominis voces"), and that of Jerome Cardan ( Var. Rer. viii, 43), men have been able to throw themselves into a cataleptic state at will.
4. Whatever explanation may be given of it, it is true of many if not of most, of those who have left the stamp of their own character on the religious history of mankind, that they have been liable to pass at times into this abnormal state. The union of intense I'eeling, strong volition, long-continued thought (the conditions of all wide and lasting influence), aided in many cases b_v the withdrawal from the lower life of the support which is needed to maintain a healthy equilibrium, ap- pears to have been more than the "earthen vessel" will bear. The words which speak of "an ecstasy of adora- tion" are often literally true. The many visions — the journey through the heavens, the so-called epilepsy of Mohammed — were phenomena of this nature. Of three great mediteval teachers, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thom- as Aquinas, and Joannes Scotus, it is recorded that they would fall into the ecstatic slate, remain motionless, seem as if dead, sometimes for a whole tlay, and then, return- ing to consciousness, speak as if they had drunk deep of divine mysteries (Gualterius, Crit.Sac. on Acts x, 10). The old traditions of Aristeas and Epimenides, the con- flicts of Dmistan and Luther with the powers of dark- ness, the visions of Savonarola, George Fox, Sweden- borg, and Bidime are generically analogous. Where there has been no extraordinary power to influence others, other conditions remaining the same, the phe- nomena have appeared among whole classes of men and women in proportion as the circumstances of their lives tended to produce an excessive susceptibility to religious or imaginative emotion. The history of monastic or- ders, of American and Irish revivals, gives countless ex- amples. Still more noticeable is the fact that many of the improvisaturi of Italy are " only able to exercise their gift when they are in a state of ecstatic trance, and speak of the gift itself as something morbid" (Cop- land, loc. cit.) ; while in strange contrast with their earlier history, and pointing perhaps to a national char- acter that has become harder and less emotional, there
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is the testimony of a German physician (Frank), who had made catalepsy a special study, that ho had never met with a sinj;le case of it among the Jews (Copland, loc.rlt.; comp. Maury, Iai Mogie et rAstrohn/ie).
5. We are now able to take a true estimate of the trances of Biblical history. As in other things, so also here, the phenomena are common to higher and lower, to true and false systems. The nature of man continu- ing tlie same, it coulil hardly be that the awfidness of the divine presence, the terrors of divine jiidgmen*, should leave it in the calm ecpiilibrium of its normal state. Whatever made the impress of a truth more in- delible, whatever gave him to whom it was revealed more power over tlie hearts of others, might well take its place in the divine education of nations and individ- ual men. We may not point to trances and ecstasies as proofs of a true revelation, but still less may we think of them as at all inconsistent with it. 'I'hiis, though we have not the word, we have the thing in several clear instances in the Bible. Some, perhaps many, tilings recorded in Scripture belong to this supernatural state of trance which are not expressly referred to it. See the long list of such supposed cases in Bp. Law's Consideration of the Theory oflieli;/ion (Lond. 1820, p. 85, 8li). We notice here only the most marked examples.