confined to men of religious character. Such are those supernatural
powers by which our present temporal blessings, in addition to the
cure of diseases, are conferred upon individuals or communities by the
instrumentality of holy men and women. I confine myself to those more
peculiarly Christian privileges, which, though they were not wholly
unknown to the Patriarchal and Mosaic Saints, are yet eminently
characteristic of those times in which the glorification of the humanity
of Jesus appears to have shed a measure of glories upon the bodies of
those who most intensely share the sufferings of His cross.

Some of these tokens of the perpetual death of the Son of God in
His Saints were, indeed, for several centuries either unknown, or
extraordinarily rare in the Christian Church herself. Such is that most
awful of the displays of the undying power of the Cross, in which the
actual wounds and tortures of the crucified Jesus are visibly renewed,
by a miraculous agency, in the persons of His chosen ones. This most
terrible of the gifts of the great God is generally preceded by some
supernatural occurrence foreshadowing the visible representation of the
scene on Calvary about to be set up before the eyes of men. At one time
it is a species of bloody sweat, like that of Jesus Christ in the garden
of Gethsemani; at another, a visible print of the cross is impressed
upon the shoulders; or angels present a mystic cup of suffering to
the hands of the self-sacrificing Saint. Then follows what is termed
_stigmatisation_, or the renewal of the actual wounds of the Crucified,
accompanied with the bloody marks of the crown of thorns upon the
sufferer's head; for the most part one by one, until the whole awful
commemoration is complete, the skin and flesh are rent on the forehead
and round the head, in the hands, in the feet, and in the side; a stream
of gore pours forth, at times trickling down in slow drops, at times (as
on Fridays) in a fuller tide, accompanied with agonising pangs of body,