Note {26b} — INTRODUCTION.

We have here thrown together a crowd of odd experiences. The savages’ examples are dealt with in the next essay; the Catholic marvels in the essay on ‘Comparative Psychical Research’. For Pascal, consult L’Amulette de Pascal, by M. Lélut; for Iamblichus, see essay on ‘Ancient Spiritualism’. As to Welsh, the evidence for the light in which he shone is printed in Dr. Hill Burton’s Scot Abroad (i. 289), from a Wodrow MS. in Glasgow University. Mr. Welsh was minister of Ayr. He was meditating in his garden late at night. One of his friends ‘chanced to open a window towards the place where he walked, and saw clearly a strange light surround him, and heard him speak strange words about his spiritual joy’. Hill Burton thinks that this verges on the Popish superstition. The truth is that eminent ministers shared the privileges of Mediums and of some saints. Examples of miraculous cures by ministers, of clairvoyance on their part, of spirit-raps attendant on them, and of prophecy, are current on Presbyterian hagiology. No ministers, to our knowledge, were ‘levitated,’ but some nearly flew out of their pulpits. Patrick Walker, in his Biographia Presbyteriana, vol. ii. p. 21, mentions a supernatural light which floated round The Sweet Singers, Meikle John Gibb and his friends, before they burned a bible. Mr. Gibb afterwards excelled as a pow-wow, or Medicine Man, among the Red Indians.