শ্রীমদ্ভগবদ্‌গীতা

“Several years ago the Rev. S. Hansard, now Rector of Bethnal Green, was doing clerical duty for a time at Hurstmonceaux in Sussex and while there, he one day went over with a party of friends of Pevensey Castle, which he did not remember to have previously visited. As he approached the gateway he became conscious of a very vivid impression of having seen it before and he “seemed to himself to see” not only the gateway itself but donkeys beneath the arch the people on the top of it. His conviction that must have visited the castle on some former occasion-although he had neither the slightest remembrance of such a visit, nor any knowledge of having ever been in the neighborhood previously to his residence at Hurstmonceaux-made him enquire from his mother if she could throw any light on the matter. She at once informed him that being in that part of the country when he was about eighteen months old, she has gone over with a large party and had taken him in the pannier of a donkey, that the elders of the party having brought lunch with them, had eaten it on the roof of the gateway, where they would have been seen from below, whilst he had been left with the attendants and donkeys.-This case is remarkable for the vividness of the sensorial impression (it may be worth mentioning that Mr. Hansard has a decidedly artistic temperament) and for the reproduction of details which were not likely to have been brought up in conversation, even if he had happened to hear the visit itself mentioned as an event of his childhood, and of such mention he has no remembrance whatever.”

In a Roman Catholic town in Germany a young woman who could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever and was said by the priests to be possessed of the devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings only a few could be traced to the Bible and most seemed to be in Rabbinical dialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman was a simple creature; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long before any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be obtained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physian who determined to trace back the girl’s history and who after much trouble discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man’s custom for years to walk up and down a passage in his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked and among them were found several of the Greek and Latin Fathers together with a collection of Rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman’s beside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source.”