Passing by the subject of prophecy, which is a species of miracle, and admits of the same kind of explanation, it may be well to touch upon the subject of prophetic inspiration. The ancients represent it as a veritable state of possession. The spirit of the god or demon violently entered into the body of a man or woman, sometimes of an animal, and made of it an organ the more faithful in proportion as it was unconscious. Everybody knows the description given by Virgil of the Cumaean sybil at the moment of vaticination: "The god, the god, she cried," etc. (Aeneid VI. v. 45 et 77.)[2] It was a sort of frenzy or sacred delirium in which divine words involuntarily and sometimes unconsciously proceeded from the mouth of the possessed. Madmen, epileptics, idiots, hysterical persons, were regarded almost everywhere as sacred beings, friends and confidants of superior spirits. Their strange malady only seems explicable by the presence in them of one of these spirits. [2] Cf. Plato, _Meno. Timaeus_, 45.--Cicero, _De Divin_ 1. 2. 18. 31. Aristotle, _Problem_, xxx. p. 474. The same ideas were current among the Hebrews, and are to be found both in the Old and in the New Testament. The prophets of Ramah, disciples of Samuel, and Saul himself, putting themselves by contagion into a state of delirium and "prophecy," are in a physical and mental state identical with that of the sybil of Cumae. The demons in possession of the man who was healed by Jesus were the first to divine and to salute His messianic dignity. The poor woman whom Paul healed at Philippi was haunted by "a spirit, a Python." The speakers with tongues at Corinth were thought by those present to be mad, and those at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost looked like drunken men (1 Sam. x. 5-7: Mark i. 24: Acts xvi. 16-20: 1 Cor. xiv: Acts ii. 13). All these manifestations, formerly held to be supernatural, are now recognised as morbid phenomena, of which mental pathology describes the physiological causes, the natural course, the fatal issue. Even in frightful disorders order has been discovered; laws and remedies have been found for many of these sad afflictions. Formerly they deified these demented and tormented souls; in the Middle Ages, and up to the eighteenth century, they burned them; we pity them and care for them. This is much the best for all concerned.