Father Hilarion Tissot, who has been mentioned previously, goes further than ourselves and would include even voluntary crime in the category of madness, but unfortunately he explains madness itself as obsession of the evil spirit. We might ask this good ecclesiastic what he would think of the father of a family who after shutting his door on a wastrel known to be capable of every kind of evil, should give him leave to frequent, advise, abduct and obsess his own little children? Let us therefore admit, so as to be truly Christian, that the devil, whomsoever he may be, obsesses only those who give themselves voluntarily to him, and that such are responsible for everything which he may prompt them to do, even as a drunken man is held liable rightly for the disorders of which he may be guilty under the influence of drink. Drunkenness is a transient madness and madness is a permanent intoxication; both are caused by a phosphoric congestion of the cerebral nerves, which destroys our etheric equilibrium and deprives the soul of its instrument of precision. The spiritual and personal soul then resembles Moses bound and swaddled in his cradle of rushes, and abandoned to the rocking of the Nile waters. It is carried away by the fluidic and material soul of the world, that mysterious water over which the Elohim brooded, when the Divine Word was formulated by the luminous sentence: Let there be light. The soul of the world is a force which tends automatically to equilibrium; either will must predominate over it or it conquers the will. It is tormented by any incomplete life, as if this were a monstrosity, and it strives therefore to absorb intellectual abortions. Hence maniacs and hallucinated people experience an irresistible yearning for destruction and death; annihilation seems to them a blessing, and they would not only attain death on their own part but would delight in witnessing that of others. They realise that life is escaping them; consciousness stings and even goads them to despair; their very existence is a perception of death, and it is hell-torment. One hears an imperious voice commanding him to kill his son in the cradle. He struggles, he weeps, he flees, but ends by taking a hatchet and slaying the child. Another, and this terrible story is a thing of recent occurrence, is driven by voices crying for hearts; he beats his parents to death, opens their breasts, tears out their hearts and begins to devour them. Whosoever of his free will is guilty of an evil action offers by that fact an earnest to eternal destruction and cannot foresee whither this fatal bargain will lead him.