features of the Methodist-Moravian doctrine about the new birth. So wonderfully is all the world connected together! * * * * * These French "convulsionists," who had, just before this time, brought their curious mental malady with them into England, were refugees from the atrocious _dragonnades_ of Louis the XIV. Maddened by his abominable and relentless persecutions, deprived by his autocratic edicts of all that life held dear, robbed of their children at the sweet age of seven years old, broken on the wheel, hunted among the mountains of the Cevennes, beggared, insulted, tortured, massacred--what wonder that these poor Protestants lost the balance of their mental powers and engendered a hysterical disease? The disease is (I believe), under its strangely mutable forms, well known to medical science, though science has never yet been able to probe all its mysterious depths. Its seat is, apparently, the great nervous ganglia of nutrition, which lie in the center of the body, and whose strange sympathetic action with and upon the brain has led to all the popular notions about the heart and neighboring organs being the seat of various impassioned feelings. Suffice it, however, at present, to observe that the phenomena which this extraordinary and infectious disease presented had sufficed to cheer the faith and animate the ardor of the Calvinists in the Cevennes against Rome. The Cevennes is a range of mountains in the south of France, divided into N. and S. * * a wild rugged country, and the abode of many Protestants, who here maintained themselves against the persecutions of their enemies. (See _Cavalier Jean_). Such, in fact, were the causes of the extasies or irregular inspirations; the want of spiritual guides and schools, spoliation, suffering, liability to torture, and constant apprehension of the galley or the gibbet, the minds of these unfortunate creatures became excited. * * * This religious enthusiasm began in Vivarais, an old territory of France, in Languedoc, on the Rhone, with the dragonnades and the revocation, repeal of an edict, about the year 1686. A practical proof of the morbific power of the emotions and passions is found in the frequent occurrence of _psychopathitis_ in times when all the elements of social life are in a state of fermentation. In and after revolutions sudden changes of fortune produce a thousand cases of mental disorder.