Mr. Cotton had preserved, what so many have lost, the Christian tradition as to evil spirits, and was right in the main. His error was in ascribing _all_ the phenomena exhibited by the practice of mesmerism to the devil and his angels. Mesmerism, though abnormal, is to a certain extent susceptible of a satisfactory explanation on natural principles. Man, as Mr. Merton, after the elder Görres, maintained, has a twofold development, the one normal, in which he rises to spiritual freedom by union with God, the other abnormal, in which he descends to spiritual slavery by descending to union with created nature. In the former he tends continually to escape from the fatalism of nature, and to ascend to the pure and serene atmosphere of spiritual freedom, in which the spirit becomes supreme over the body. In the latter he follows the laws of fatal or unfree nature, loses his spiritual dominion, becomes, or tends to become, subject in his soul to his body, while the body falls under the operation of the general forces of necessary nature, and responds fatally, or without freedom, to the pulses of the external universe. In the ascending development, by the aid of grace and good angels, the man, the Christian mystic, like St. Catharine, St. Theresa, or St. Bernardine of Sienna, and so many others of the saints of the Church, rises to spiritual freedom, and even to a certain extent, liberates the body from the fatalism of nature. The body itself seems to enter into the freedom of the spirit, and, through the free soul informing it, to be able to resist the action of necessary or unfree nature, as the vital principle enables the living body to resist and overcome the action of chemical affinity. The body is as it were spiritualized, not absolutely indeed, but partially, as if in anticipation of the resurrection, or rather, as pointing to a resurrection and its glorious transformation hereafter. It is baptized, participates, if I may so say, in the sanctifying grace infused into the soul, becomes pure, and even when the soul leaves it, emits a fragrant odor.[7] ----- Footnote 7: I do not forget here, nor do I intend to assert any thing against the doctrine of the Holy Council of Trent, that concupiscence remains after baptism, for the combat, or that the _fomes_ of sin remain, and that as long as one lives there is the possibility of sin. The body, in this life, is never wholly liberated and restored to its integral state; but that it is liberated in some measure, and that it in the saints, (in some saints at least,) in a degree participates, even this side the grave, in the freedom of the soul, I think is undeniable. -----