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Nowadays, in the management of his "subject," "clairvoyant," or "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his preternatural conquests.
They had the feminine power of extinguishing things disagreeable, so long as nature or the fates did them no violence. When these forces sent an emissary to confound them, as was clearly the case with Mrs. Chump, they fought. The dreadful creature insisted upon shows of maudlin affection that could not be accorded to her, so that she existed in a condition of preternatural sensitiveness.
I now began to understand why it was peculiarly for unintelligible doctrines like Transubstantiation and the Tri-unity that Christians had committed such execrable wickednesses. Now also for the first time I understood what had seemed not frightful only, but preternatural, the sensualities and cruelties enacted as a part of religion in many of the old Paganisms.
The industrial value of such a lively animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either case.
Most of these prodigies were not preternatural; the speaking ox was probably received on the report of a single hearer; and the whole was invested with exaggerated terror by means of the desolation of the preceding year. Prodigies are plentifully distributed through the earlier parts of the Roman history; but it is not our purpose to enter into a chronological detail on the subject.
The Lady of Longueville was on the bed of death an illness of two days had brought her to the brink of the grave; but there was in her eye and countenance a restless and preternatural animation, and her voice was clear and shrill, as she said, "Why does the daughter of Warwick, the Yorkist, seek refuge in the house of the fallen and childless Lancastrian?"
“I pray you,” answered the minister, “if thou hast any means of pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins,” added he, attempting to smile, “I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me!”
On hearing the charge, the man seemed enlightened, and, saying not another word, resigned himself with preternatural civility to the search- party, who, with their staves in their hands, surrounded him on all sides, and marched him back towards the shepherd's cottage. It was eleven o'clock by the time they arrived.
They proved, however, that the preternatural spectre, which had so long filled the country with awe and terror, was no unreal being, still less an existence whose appearance suspended the ordinary laws of God and Nature; that, on the contrary, it was the simple production of a common cause, exhibited in an unusual manner, but as regular an effect, and as easy to be accounted for, as the reflection of a face in a looking glass.
The most signal preternatural appearances were the great comet, which shone very bright for seven nights after Caesar's death, and then disappeared, and the dimness of the sun, whose orb continued pale and dull for the whole of that year, never showing its ordinary radiance at its rising, and giving but a feeble heat.
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