"What

relating to that trial. I found one thing in it, at which I was a little surprized, with respect to the great outcries that were made against Father Coton. He set down upon a piece of paper several questions he meant to propose to a woman possessed with the devil. Amongst other questions this was one : is the most proper passage of Scripture to prove purgatory?" The Protestants joined with a great number of Catholics in crying out against this impious curiosity, and insulting both the father confessor of Henry IV, and the whole order of the Jesuits: yet it is certain that the confessor did but follow herein the practice of his church, excepting some questions he would have offered concerning political affairs. Did not the exorcist of Loudun ask the devil, "Which was the best means by which a creature departed from God might return to him?" Did he not ask him, "whether, since his fall, he had ever tasted the pleasures of divine love? And which is the strongest bond that fastens 'men to the creatures? Whether there was any body in hell who had had a great relish of the divine love upon earth?" The devil answered at large these questions, and he even discovered many secrets of his politics, and the means to overthrow them. These things have been not only practised at Loudun, but are the current style of the exorcists, as the Protestant divines object to the Roman Catholics. So that the particular hatred against the Jesuits was the reason of declaiming against the conduct of father Coton, which is not censured when others make use of it. A respect of persons will always prevail

among men.

We find in the life of a Jesuit, who was one of the exorcists of the nuns of Loudun, several particulars upon this subject. I will mention two things out of it, one of which is very surprising: I know them only from Mr Cousin's extracts. Here is what I have

read in his "Journal des Sçavans," in the place where he mentions the life of father Seurin.*" Upon occasion of this father's conflict with the devils, the author of his life proves at large the truth of the nuns of Loudun being possessed by the devil, especially by the testimony of two of the greatest wits of this age. The one is cardinal Richelieu, who sent exorcists to Loudun, maintained at the king's expense, and the other, lord Montague, who, having seen the devils go out of the body of the mother of the angels, was perfectly convinced of it, and discoursed of it with Urban VIII, when he abjured his heresy, and made profession of the Catholic faith before him." What I am going to say is much more extraordinary. You will see there a man who redeemed Jesus Christ, that is, who, to rescue him from the hands of the devil, gave up himself to the devil. Read these words of the journalist. "When father Seurin exorcised the nuns of Loudun, the devils declared that 'two magicians had seized three hosts to profane them.' Father Seurin fell to prayers to obtain the deliverance of his master's body, and consented that his own body should be submitted to the power of the devils, in order to redeem it. The offers were accepted, and the exchange performed. The devils took the three hosts out of the hands of their agents, and put them at the foot of the pix of the holy sacrament that was then exposed, and one of them entered into the body of the father, who remained possessed, or obsessed, the greatest part of his life!!!"--Art. GRANDIER.

*Journal des Sçavans, pag. 311.

+ Journal des Sçavans, ubi supra.

Such is the atrocious imposture, fraud, and cruelty which an ultramontane and fanatical portion of the priesthood would restore in France. M. Sismondi, by recently illustrating the lauded age of St Louis, has well exposed the rancorous folly and bigotry of this temporarily revived faction. ED.

SPINOZA.

BENEDICT DE SPINOZA a Jew by birth, who forsook Judaism, and at last became an Atheist, was a native of Amsterdam. He was a systematical Atheist, and brought his Atheism into a new method, although the ground of his doctrine was the same with that of several ancient and modern philosophers, both in Europe and the east. I think that he is the first who reduced Atheism into a system, and formed it into a body of doctrine, ordered and connected according to the manner of the geometricians; but otherwise his opinion is not new. It has been believed long ago that the whole universe is but one substance, and that God and the world are but one being. Pietro della Valle mentions certain Mahometans who call themselves "Ehl eltahkik, or, men of truth, men of certainty, who believe that there is nothing existent but the four elements, which are God, man, and every thing else." He also mentions the Zindikites, another Mahometan sect. 'They come nearer the Sadducees, and have their name from them. They do not believe a Providence, nor the resurrection of the dead, as Giggoius shews upon the word Zindik. One of their opinions is, that whatever is seen, whatever is in the world, whatever hath been created, is God." There have been such Heretics among Christians, for we find in the beginning of the thirteenth century, one David of Dinant, who made no distinction between God and the first matter. It is a mistake to say that he is the first who vented such a foolish doctrine. Albertus Magnus mentions a philosopher who had done the like. "Alexander, the Epicurean, held that God was matter, or was not different from it, and that all things were essentially God, and that forms were imaginary accidents, and had no real entity, and, therefore he said all things were substantially the same, and this God he called sometimes Jupiter, sometimes Apollo,

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and sometimes Pallas, and that forms were the robe of Pallas, and garment of Jupiter; and he asserted that none of the wise men could fully reveal what was concealed under the robe of Pallas, and the garment of Jupiter." Some believe that this Alexander lived in Plutarch's time; others say, in express words, that he lived before David of Dinant, who, perhaps, knew not that there was such a philosopher of the Epicurean sect, but at least it must be granted me that he knew very well he had not invented that doctrine. Had he not learned it of his master? Was he not the disciple of that Almalricus whose dead body was dug up and burnt in the year 1208, and who taught that all things were God, and but one being? "All things are God, God is all things. Creator and creature the same. Ideas create and are created. God is therefore said to be the end of all things, because they all return into him that they may rest unchangeably in God, and continue one individual and unalterable. And as Abraham is not of one nature, Isaac of another, but of one and the same, so he asserted that all things were one, and all things were God. For he affirmed God to be the essence of all creatures."*

I dare not affirm that Strato, a peripatetic philosopher, was of the same opinion, for I do not know whether he taught that the universe or nature was a simple and only substance; I only know that he believed it to be inanimate, and that he acknowledged no other God than nature. As he laughed at Epicurus's atoms and vacuum, one might think that he made no distinction between the several parts of the world; but this is no necessary consequence. All that can be concluded is, that his opinion comes a great deal nearer Spinozism than the system of atoms. There is even ground to believe that he did not teach, as the

See Prateolus, in Elencho Hæresum, Voce Almaricus, page m. 23.

atomists did, that the world was a new work, and produced by chance; but that he taught, as the Spinozists do, that nature has produced it necessarily, and from all eternity. I think the following words of Plutarch, if rightly understood, signify, that nature made all things of itself, and without knowledge, and not that its works began by chance. "Finally, Strabo denies that the world itself is an animal, and will have it, that nature obeys the casual impulses of fortune, for a certain spontaneous power of nature gives to things a beginning, and in like manner afterwards, an end is put by the same nature to physical motions."* Seneca also represents Plato's doctrine, and that of Strato, as two opposite extremes; one of them deprived God of a body, and the other deprived him of a soul. I think I have read in father Salier's book upon the species of the Eucharist, that several ancient philosophers or heretics taught the unity of all things; but because I have not that book now, I only mention this by the by.

The doctrine of the soul of the world, which was so common among the ancients, and made the principal part of the system of the stoics, is, at the bottom, the same with that of Spinoza, which would more clearly appear, if it had been explained by authors versed in geometry; but because the books wherein it is mentioned are written rather in a rhetorical than a dogmatical method, whereas Spinoza is a precise writer, and avoids the figurative style, which often hinders us from having a just notion of a body of doctrine; hence it is that we find several material differences between his system, and that of the soul of the world. If any one should maintain that Spinozism is more coherent, he should also maintain that it is not so orthodox; for the stoics did not deprive God of his Providence; they re-united in him the knowledge of

* Plutarchus adversus Colotem, p. 1115, b.