“I have seen,” says Mr. Le Roi Sunderland, himself a preacher, (_Zion’s Watchman_, New York, Oct. 2, 1842,) “persons often ‘lose their strength,’ as it is called, at camp-meetings and other places of great religious excitement; and not pious people alone, but those, also, who were not professors of religion. In the spring of 1824, while performing pastoral labour in Dennis, Massachusetts, I saw more than twenty affected in this way. Two young men, of the name of Crowell, came one day to a prayer-meeting. They were quite indifferent. I conversed with them freely, but they showed no signs of penitence. From the meeting they went to their shop, (they were shoemakers,) to finish some work before going to the meeting in the evening. On seating themselves, they were both struck perfectly stiff. I was immediately sent for, and found them sitting paralyzed” (he means taken with the initiatory form of trance-sleep, and possibly cataleptic) “on their benches, with their work in their hands, unable to get up, or to move at all. I have seen scores of persons affected the same way. I have seen persons lie in this state forty-eight hours. At such times they are unable to converse, and are sometimes unconscious of what is passing round them. At the same time, they say they are in a happy state of mind.” The following extract from the same journal portrays another kind of nervous seizure, as it was manifested at the great revival some forty years ago, at Kentucky and Tennessee. “The convulsions were commonly called ‘the jerks.’ A writer, (M’Neman) quoted by Mr. Power, (_Essay on the Influence of the Imagination over the Nervous System_,) gives this account of their course and progress: “‛At first appearance these meetings exhibited nothing to the spectator but a scene of confusion that could scarcely be put into language. They were generally opened with a sermon, near the close of which there would be an unusual outcry, some bursting out into loud ejaculations of prayer, &c. “‛The rolling exercise consisted in being cast down in a violent manner, doubled with the head and feet together, or stretched in a prostrate manner, turning swiftly over like a dog. Nothing in nature could better represent the jerks, than for one to goad another alternately on every side with a piece of red-hot iron. The exercise commonly began in the head, which would fly backwards and forwards, and from side to side, with a quick jolt, which the person would naturally labour to suppress, but in vain. He must necessarily go on as he was stimulated, whether with a violent dash on the ground, and bounce from place to place, like a foot-ball; or hopping round, with head, limbs, and trunk twitching and jolting in every direction, as if they must inevitably fly asunder,’” &c.