As to a touching belief in the efficacy of disease, we may find it in minds much less confused than Browne’s. It runs through such books as “The Psychology of Religious Mysticism,” by James H. Leuba, professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr. According to Browne, mental unbalance produces indomitable courage and inflexible will. According to Professor Leuba, the hysterical saints lived lives of “joyful activity, broken only by transports of surpassing love and peaceful rest.”[187] Not a very comprehensive description of the lives of saints. But if there be such hysteria as this, such epilepsy as Browne describes, it is a pity that the germs cannot be isolated, propagated, and sown broadcast. These authors are among those who ruin their hypotheses by inadvertently accounting for too much. Their hysteria and epilepsy, stretched to meet all demands, lose the quality of disease and take on the quality of genius. Would it not be well at least to distinguish two types of hysteria (some writers make even epilepsy hysterical), the malignant and the benign? Or if the word hysteria merely means emotion, why not recognize the fact that an emotion may indicate conditions as categorically opposite as those reflected in the sensations of pleasure and of pain? It is grossly irrational to narrow it down to a single sinister meaning if it is to be put forward as the “cause” and the “explanation” of such diverse effects as those which are clothed in the willing garb of a Sister of Charity and those which lead to the unwilling wearing of a straight-jacket. Nor is it any less absurd to say that St. Paul, having partaken of heady salvation-liquor such as was drunken of aforetime only by charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, and adding to its potency by insisting upon its universal applicability--to say all this even by implication, and then to add as Browne does[188] that “in his own class, Paul was one of the stupendously great men of the earth.” “He was,” the narrative continues, “a superb statesman. And he was possessed of an energy, a courage, and an indomitable will, the like of which have rarely been known in all the history of great men.... Again and again he was scourged and imprisoned.... And yet he persisted, never resting from his grueling labor of carrying his Christ to the Gentiles, incessantly running to and fro, preaching, writing, arguing and comforting, until at last, a tired and broken man, he died a martyr’s death in the city of Rome.... It was in the year 67, according to tradition, that Paul was beheaded.” Once again Browne considers himself privileged to repudiate all that a man stands for, his sole claim to distinction, and yet to put him on a pedestal of insincere rhetoric. When he speaks of Paul’s “own class” does he mean the class of “charlatans, madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools”? Indeed, St. Paul himself is reported to have said, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”