MORAL EFFECT OF MESMERISM.--Dr. Voisin recommends a suggestive application of mesmerism. He experimented on a coarse, debauched and lazy woman, who was susceptible to magnetism; and kept her in the mesmeric sleep ten or twelve hours a day, and to its value as a curative agent he added moral education. During her sleep he suggested ideas of obedience, of submission, of decency, and exhorted her to useful labor. In this sleep she memorized whole pages of moral books. A complete transformation was effected in her in a few months. What a glorious field here opens for the moral reformer! The calloused criminal who will not listen to moral suasion, deaf alike to entreaty and prayer, may be hypnotized, and in that susceptible condition taught the Lord’s Prayer and moral precepts; his moral nature roused and thus be transformed into a new being. The influence of some men when brought into contact with criminals is explained by their strong mesmeric or hypnotic influence. They always lift up those they control. They are born masters, though they may not understand the cause of their strength. TRANCE AND CLAIRVOYANCE.--The trance or clairvoyant state has been observed in all ages and among all races of mankind. It has, in seasons of great religious excitement, become epidemic, the devotee falling in convulsions, becoming cataleptic, and after hours, days, or even months of apparent death, awakening with mind overwrought with visions of the strange world in which it had dwelt during the period of unconsciousness. The records of clairvoyance are as old as history. If prophecy, the “clear seeing of the future,” be its fruit, the prophets and sages of the past were all more or less endowed with this gift. Socrates and Apollonius predicted, and were conscious of, events transpiring at remote distances. Cicero mentions that when the revelations are being given, someone must be present to record them, as “these sleepers do not retain any recollection of them.” Pliny, speaking of the celebrated Hermotimus, of Clazomenæ, remarks that his soul separated itself from the body, and wandered in various parts of the earth, relating events occurring in distant places. During the period of inspiration his body was insensible. The day of the battle of Pharsalia, Cornelius, a priest of profound piety, described while in Padua, as though present, every feature of the fight. Nicephorus says that when the unfortunate Valens, taking refuge in a barn, was burned by the Goths, a hermit named Paul, in a fit of ecstasy, cried out to those who were with him: “It is now that Valens burns.” Tertulian describes two females, celebrated for their piety and ecstasy, that they entered that state in the midst of the congregation, revealed celestial secrets, and knew the innermost hearts of persons.