set by the Bishop of Tilopolis) ordered the demon in Latin, to carry the boy to the ceiling.  ’His body became stiff, he was dragged from the middle of the church to a pillar, and there, his feet joined, his back fixed (colle) against the pillar, he was transported in the twinkling of an eye to the ceiling, like a weight rapidly drawn up, without any apparent action on his part.  I kept him in the air for half an hour, and then bade him drop without hurting himself,’ when he fell ‘like a packet of dirty linen’.  While he was up aloft, Delacourt preached at him in Latin, and he became, ‘perhaps the best Christian in Cochin China’.

Dr. Carpenter’s explanation must either be that Delacourt lied; or that a tradition, surviving from savagery, and enforced by the example of the Bishop of Tilopolis, made a missionary, un peu incredule, as he says, believe that he saw, and watched for half an hour, a phenomenon which he never saw at all.  But then Dr. Carpenter also dismisses, with none but the general theory already quoted, the experience of ’a nobleman of high scientific attainments,’ who ‘seriously assures us’ that he saw Home ’sail in the air, by moonlight, out of one window and in at another, at the height of seventy feet from the ground.’ {326}

Here is the stumbling-block.  A nobleman of high scientific attainment, in company with another nobleman, and a captain in the army, all vouched for this performance of Home.  Now could the savage tradition, which attributes flight to convulsive and entranced persons, exercise such an influence on these three educated modern witnesses; could an old piece of folklore, in company with ‘expectancy,’ so wildly delude them?  Can ’high scientific attainments’ leave their possessor with such humble powers of observation?  But, to be sure, Dr. Carpenter does not tell his readers that there were three witnesses.  Dr. Carpenter says that, if we believe Lord Crawford (and his friends), we can ’have no reason for refusing credit to the historical evidence of the demoniacal elevation of Simon Magus’.  Let us point out that we have no contemporary evidence at all about Simon’s feat, while for Home’s, we have the evidence of three living and honourable men, whom Dr. Carpenter might have cross-examined.  The doings of Home and of Simon were parallel, but nothing can be more different than the nature of the evidence for what they are said to have done.  This, perhaps, might have been patent to a man like Dr. Carpenter of ‘early scientific training’.  But he illustrated his own doctrine of ‘the dominant idea’; he did not see that he was guilty of a fallacy, because his ‘idea’ dominated him.  Stumbling into as deep a gulf, Dr. Carpenter put Lord Crawford’s evidence (he omitted that of his friends) on a level with, or below, the depositions of witnesses as to ’the aerial transport of witches to attend their demoniacal festivities’.  But who ever swore that he saw witches so transported?  The evidence was not to witnessed facts, but only to a current belief, backed by confessions under torture.  No testimony could be less on a par with that of a living ’nobleman of high scientific attainments,’ to his own experience.