The sainted bishop simply confesses here to having practiced a bit of sorcery. _Every mesmerizer knows the power of will during an intense desire bent on any particular subject._ Whether in consequence of “co-incidents” or otherwise, the opened verse suggested to his mind revenge by drowning. Passing the remainder of the day in “deep concern,” and possessed by this all-absorbing thought, the saint--it may be unconsciously--exercises his will on the subject; and thus while imagining in the accident the hand of God, he simply becomes a sorcerer exercising his magnetic will which reacts on the person feared; and the count barely escapes with his life. Were the accident decreed by God, the culprit would have been drowned; for a simple bath could not have altered his malevolent resolution against St. Gregory had he been very intent on it. Furthermore, we find anathemas fulminated against this lottery of fate, at the council of Varres, which forbids “all ecclesiastics, under pain of excommunication, to perform that kind of divination, or to pry into futurity, by looking into any book, or writing, whatsoever.” The same prohibition is pronounced at the councils of Agda in 506, of Orleans, in 511, of Auxerre in 595, and finally at the council of Aenham in 1110; the latter condemning “sorcerers, witches, diviners, such as occasioned death by magical operations, and who practiced fortune-telling by the holy-book lots;” and the complaint of the joint clergy against de Garlande, their bishop at Orleans, and addressed to Pope Alexander III., concludes in this manner: “Let your apostolical hands put on strength to _strip naked_ the iniquity of this man, that the curse prognosticated on the day of his consecration may overtake him; for the gospels being opened on the altar _according to custom_, the first words were: _and the young man, leaving his linen cloth, fled from them naked_.”[30]