The Spiritualist newspaper > No.393, March 5th 1880

No. 393.—VOLUME SIXTEEN; NUMBER TEN.
LONDON, FRIDAY, MARCH 6 th, 1880.
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BENEFICENT HAUNTINGS.
This number of The Spiritualist contains
much about the visions seen at a Catholic
Church in the village of Knock, County Mayo,
Ireland, and the subsequent healing of in¬
veterate diseases, such as blindness from birth,
at the sacred spot. There is no reason to
doubt either the good faith of the witnesses, or
the reality of the cures effected.
The human mind cannot rest satisfied with
isolated facts which are outside the range of
ordinary experience, and temporarily separated
from any system of philosophy, consequently
not a few thinkers will desire to know the
meaning and the place in nature of such
psychical and physiological phenomena, as have
been evolved in the Mayo village.
In the first place did the Yirgin Mary, with
the stars and other glorious surroundings, ap¬
pear in objective form at the Church ? Ko;
because some of the witnesses saw more or less
than others who were observing at the same
time, and most of the onlookers saw nothing
till they were told what they ought to see.
The few witnesses who saw the apparitions
were doubtless mesmeric sensitives, and syn¬
chronous waking visions as well as synchronous
dreams are common among such persons. More¬
over, the visions were of the character of those
which are seen under mesmeric influence, and
not of the nature of the appearance presented
by materialised apparitions. The differences
between these two classes of apparitions are
set forth, with numerous matter-of-fact ex¬
amples in the book, Spirits before our Eyes.
The next question is, did the whole matter
originate in the waking dream of a boy, or was
there an external spirit influence ? The pro¬
bability is that it was a vision produced by the
action of an unembodied spirit upon mesmeric
sensitives, not alone because it was so entirely
unexpected by the first witnesses, but because
such synchronous visions can be proved to have
in other cases been due to the action of an
outside spirit influence, and because the cures
subsequently effected at the Church tend to
show that some powerful psychical influence
appertains to the spot.