Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THEOLOGICAL " RESTATEMENTS."
their mania by singing, dancing, and sports of various sorts,
until at last it was brought under control.*
Scenes similar to these, in their essential character, have
arisen more recently in Protestant countries, but with the
difference that what has been generally attributed by Roman
Catholic ecclesiastics to Satan is attributed by Protestant
ecclesiastics to the Almighty. Typical among the greater
exhibitions of this were those which began in the Methodist
chapel at Redruth in Cornwall convulsions, leaping, jump-
ing, until some four thousand persons were seized by it.
The same thing is seen in the ruder parts of America at
" revivals " and camp meetings. Nor in the ruder parts of
America alone. In June, 1893, at a funeral in the city of
Brooklyn, one of the mourners having fallen into hysterical
fits, several other cases at once appeared in various parts of
the church edifice, and some of the patients were so seri-
ously affected that they were taken to a hospital.
In still another field these exhibitions are seen, but more
after a mediaeval pattern : in the Tigretier of Abyssinia we
have epidemics of dancing which seek and obtain miracu-
lous cures.
Reports of similar manifestations are also sent from missionaries
from the west coast of Africa, one of whom sees in
some of them the characteristics of cases of possession men-
tioned in our Gospels, and is therefore inclined to attribute
them to Satan.f
IIL THEOLOGICAL " RESTATEMENTS." FINAL TRIUMPH
OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW AND METHODS.
But, happily, long before these latter occurrences, science
had come into the field and was gradually diminishing this
class of diseases. Among the earlier workers to this
purpose was the great Dutch physician Boerhaave.
better
Find-
* See Tissot, V Imagination : ses Bienfaits et ses Egarements surtout dans le
Domaine du Merveilleux, Paris, 1868, liv. iv, ch. vii, 7 : Les PossM^es de Morzine ;
also Constans, Relation sur une Epiditnie de Hyst&o-Dhnonopathie, Paris, 1863.
f For the cases in Brooklyn, see the New York Tribune of about June lo, 1893.
For the Tigretier, with especially interesting citations, see Hecker, chap, iii, sec. i.
For the cases in western Africa, see the Rev. J. L. Wilson, Western Africa, p. 217.
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