In the descending development, that is, in the abnormal development, in which we turn our backs on our Maker, who is at once our Original and End, our Creator and our Supreme Good, and tend in the direction from him, our soul lets go its mastery, and our body falls under the dominion of unfree nature, enters into the series of its laws, and is exposed to all its necessary and invincible forces. We become not merely sensual, but, in some sense, physical men, and act under and with the great physical agents of the universe. We become feeble and strong as the lightning whose bolt rends the oak, and is turned aside by a silken thread. Now to this abnormal development, mesmerism, in my judgment, belongs; and therefore, though abnormal, it is not necessarily preternatural. It belongs not to healthy but unhealthy nature, and its phenomena are never exhibited except in a subject naturally or artificially diseased. I have never known a person of vigorous constitution and robust health mesmerized. The experiments of Baron Reichenbach were all made on persons in ill health, for the most part on patients under medical treatment. The seeress of Provost was sickly, and suffering from an incurable malady; and it may be asserted as a general rule, that no one is a _subject_ of mesmerism whose constitution, especially the nervous constitution, is in its normal state. I have no doubt that many of the phenomena regarded by the vulgar as the effect of Satanic invasion, are to be explained by reference to this abnormal development, without the supposition of any direct agency of evil spirits. The precise limits of the power of this abnormal development we do not know, and therefore we are always to be exceedingly slow to assume the direct invasion of the devil to explain this or that extraordinary phenomenon, as Mr. Merton has already explained. The error of Mr. Cotton was in not distinguishing between abnormal phenomena artificially produced, and the phenomena of real demonic presence. He asked too much of us, and we gave him nothing. He failed to command from us the respect he deserved, and I am sorry for it. He was a worthy man in his way, and far less superstitious, and far more philosophical than those who thought it a mark of their superiority to ridicule him. But he is gone, and has in his own denomination left few behind who are worthy to step into his shoes.