And
it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came
upon him." [2] Every thing in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and
it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving
concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. No doubt, many such
take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of
them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind
acts without interruption. Terror and the heated imagination will, even in
the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a
simple object possessing none of them in reality.
But ghost stories are absurd. Whenever a real ghost appears,--by which I
mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,--if the supernatural
character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on
the spectator have always been most terrible,--convulsion, idiocy, madness,
or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old
Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers
of the Hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of
all animal power. But in our common ghost stories, you always find that the
seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite
well the next day.
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