Note 17 — Chapter II · THE EXTRAORDINARY STATE OF APOLOGETICS WITH REGARD TO MIRACLES

So many “spiritual experiences” of a like nature are on record that it is difficult to know which is the best to select for comparison. Professor Huxley, in his essay on “The Value of Witness to the Miraculous,” takes the cases of Eginhard (born about A.D. 770), who wrote The History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs of Christ, S.S. Marcellinus and Petrus; and George Fox, who, about the year 1647, heard voices and saw visions which assured him that “there is a living God who made all things.” Perhaps the case of Emanuel Swedenborg17 may be worth a moment’s consideration. He was the son of a bishop, and was carefully educated. Endowed with unusual intellectual powers and an iron constitution, he acquired vast stores of learning. From early childhood he evinced a serious turn of mind, combined with a remarkable tendency to indulge in religious speculations. Eventually he received an extraordinary “call” in the shape of a vision. This converted the scientific inquirer into a supernatural prophet. He was now the mouthpiece of God. “The Lord Himself hath called me, who was graciously pleased to manifest Himself to me, His unworthy servant, in a personal experience in the year 1745.” “I have never,” he says in his work on True Christian Religion, “received anything appertaining to the doctrines of that Church from any angel, but from the Lord alone, while I was reading the Word.” Swedenborg was a man who won the respect, confidence, and love of all who came in contact with him. He had a peculiarly abstract metaphysical character of mind, and was firmly convinced that he had “conversed with spirits” and “seen the Lord.” So was Martin Luther perfectly convinced that he had seen the Devil when he threw his ink-pot at him. So was the peasant girl of Lourdes convinced that she had seen the Virgin Mary. So is Evan Roberts convinced that he has seen his Saviour. So have many good Christians from time to time been convinced that they have seen Christ, the Virgin Mary, saints, and angels. Father Ignatius, the Evangelist monk, may be, as I have heard him called, an emotional wreck; but he is also a most earnest Christian, and he is quite sure that he has seen the Virgin Mary.18 John Wesley, whose followers throughout the world to-day number 30,000,000, was also a visionary. Thousands and thousands of heathens as well as Christians have had visions of their saviours; but such experiences could scarcely be brought forward seriously as a proof of the existence of the divinities believed to have been seen, or of their ascension after a life upon earth. Visual and auditory hallucinations are now the subject of a searching inquiry by the Society for Psychical Research, and, willing as some of its members are to explain metapsychical phenomena by the simple theory of the spiritists, the growing opinion is that these apparitions and voices are purely hallucinatory and due to causes which are not extra-human.