Frou time to time one reads in the Peking Gazette of criminals sentenced to punishments, the mere thought of which is enough to make the blood run cold. When such a barbarous mode of exception as the slicing into pieces is thus recognised and approved by the highest authorities in the Empire, it is easy to believe all the horrible tales of cunning cruelty that torment much and hold the sufferers long, which are occasionally brought to light in the provinces. The distinction between egal and illegal methods of question is perfectly illusory, nor in any case is there much to choose between them. Each and all are alike sickening, whether we try to realise the sensations of a victim hung up by a thumb or a toe, a wrist or an armpit, having his joints squeezed, his back scourged with hooks, or his eyes smoked with pungent incense. Yet natives will tell us that all these abominable torments and others unspeakably worse, are borne for the most part with fortitude, the lesser grades of punishment being those under which the sufferers ery out most loudly.
As for death itself, it seems to have no terror for a Chinaman. This equanimity under never-heard-of torturing pain would be hardly credible, unless we saw it for ourselves, which few foreigners have done, or had evidence from unwilling witnesses as to the occasional inefficacy of all the devices which human cruelty can suggest to overcome human endurance. When, in August, 1870, Ma Hsin-yi, Viceroy of the Two Kian; was murdered, the Imperial instructions to "obtain evidence by any means from the prisoner, even by fire, to drag the truth out of him" (P. G., 7th October, 1870) were very faithfully carried into effect. The oficial report of the trial (P. @., 15th-18th April, 1871) states that—
The Court ordered chains to he heated, and the prisoner was forced to kneel upon them, Every day this discipline was maintained, but nothing save the most treasonable expressions could be got out of the prisoner. For more than twenty days he was kept kneeling on hot chains, but he would make no alteration in his confession. Frequently he was unable to eat, and was to all appearance at the point of death, As it would never have done to allow him to die from exhaustion, in this way cheating justice of her flits, it was thought necessary to hurry on so that he might live long enough to be suitably executed, When torment of this kind, and carried to this extent, failed to shake the constancy of a common shopkeeper who had nothing Dut a sense of real or imaginary domestic wrongs to support him, one is prompted to enquire to what extent and by virtue of what provision a human being is capable of supporting pain with composure or at least with fortitude. The first thing that strikes us is that, supposing the motive to be strong enough, physical conditions count for little or nothing. It is not easy to believe, but the explanation may pass for what it is worth, that training from youth upwards to bear pain accounts for the fortitude of Spartans in carly times, of North American Indians, and the saints of Hindostan in the present day. We wonder at the iron nerves of the Roman Mucius, who with unmoved face thrust his hand into the fire of the altar before ing Porsenna, and held it there until it was consumed. But no theory of physical strength will account for the constance of matrons and virgins who, during theNeronie persecution, were lacerated with scourges, torn by wild beasts, burned alive, compelled to illustrate in their own persons all the horrors of Tartarus and all the most Dloody legends of the ancient mythology. Crucifixion was " common death, and it must be remembered that under ordinary circumstances crucifixion kills purely by protracted torture. Yet martyrdom was a festival, and so eagerly was it sought that the rulers of the Church were compelled at length to threaten excommunication against those who braved death needlessly. The spectacles of martyrs destroyed by all Kinds of hideous devices, yet meanwhile deriding their butchers and finally dying in transports of joy, is susceptible of but one explanation, namely, that from some cause or another they did not feel the pain, And this cause lay in their extatic condition, all perceptions arising from external sources being held in abeyance, partly by an exortion of the will which concentrated the mind upon one far distant point, and partly by the supremacy of the perceptions arising from within. For the extatic condition is supported by those very things which go to enfeeble the body, by mortifications, macerations, seclusion, sleeplessness, starvation, by all the miseries of asceticism. Hallucinations of all the senses are easily producible by the mind itself giving way to a dominant idea, or by the action exercised on the mind by an illused body. Thus the eyes may be filled with visions of loveliness and glory, the cars may resound with the music of angelic choirs, the nostrils be sated with delicious perfumes, all these sensations being absolutely subjective without the faintest trace of objective reality to correspond with them. This, we belive, fully explains the marvellous insensibility to pain evidenced by the Christian martyrs, and on a somewhat lower line it may help to account also for the fortitude of Chinese under torture. The assassin of whom we wrote above had doubtless no visions of heaven opening before him, but in the combined excitement and exhaustion of his condition arising from the scenes at which he had assisted and the enforced asceticism of his lifo for months in Chinese dungeons we can find an explanation of the careless ness that he displayed before his judges, The bearing of considerations such as these upon the reality of visions and other miraculous phenomena related in Church legends is obvious. We shall not be suspected of inordinate credulity, though we assort our belief that with regard to the great majority of these legends, charges of falsehood and imposture are quite misplaced. There is no need to invoke the invincible and characteristic mendacity of hysterical women in order to supply an explanation. We have no doubt whatsoever that whenever and wherever a virtue is made of starving all day and praying all night, it will be rewarded by visitations of heavenly beings, by sensations ofbeingraised from the ground by angelic hands, and so forth. And when we consider that we relate without doubt or scruple as certainly true any ordinary fact which we have only on the authority of some one in whose trathfulness we have absolute confidence, we need not be surprised that at times or in stages of society where there is no distinetion drawn between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the credible and the incredible, the subjective experiences of any venerated person would in perfect good faith be ro-corded and accepted as objectively true. There is yet another class of miraculous phenomena susceptible of a like though not an identical explanation, Most people have heard of the epidemic of convulsions which broke out, especially among women, at the time of the Jansenist persecution, lighted up by the bull Unigenitus. The convulsionaires of St. Medardushave become
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.