times troubled with Epileptical Fits. 4 That the Maior sent the next Morning to Dig the place where the Spectre said the Murder'd Man was buried, and there was neither Bones found, nor any difference of the Earth in that place from the rest,
But we answer briefly to the first: That his falling off to the Non-Conformists, though it may argue a vacillancy of his Judgment, yet it does not any defect of his external Senses, as if he were less able to discern when he saw or heard any thing than before: To the second, That it is a perfect contradiction to his strong belief of the Truth of his own Story, which plainly implies that he did not feign it to make himself an extraordinary Some body: To the third: That an Epileptical Person, when he is out of his Fits, hath his external Senses, as true and entire, as a drunken Man has when his drunken Fit is over, or a Man awake after a Night of Sleep and Dreams. So that this Argument has not the least shew of force with it, unless you will take away the authority of all Mens Senses, because at sometimes they have not a competent use of them, namely, in Sleep, Drunkenness, or the like. But now lastly, for the fourth, which is most considerable, It is yet of no greater force than to make it questionable, whether this Spectre was the Ghost of his Father, or some ludicrous Goblin, that would put a Trick upon Thomas Goddard, by personating his Father in law, and by a false pointing at the pretended Grave of the Murdered make him ridiculous. For what Porphyrius has noted, I doubt not but is true, That Dæmons sometimes personate the Souls of the Deceased. But if an uncoffined Body being laid in a Ground exposed to wet and dry, the Earth may in Thirty or Forty Years space consume the very Bones and assimilate all to the rest of the Mold, when some Earths will do it in less than the fifteenth or twentieth part of that space: Or if the Ghost of Edward Avon might have forgot the certain place (it being no grateful Object of his Memory) where he buried the murdered Man, and only guessed that to be it, because it was something suck, as if the Earth yielded upon the wasting of the buried Body, the rest of the Story will still naturally import, that it was the very Ghost of Edward Avon. Besides, himself expresly declares, as that the Body was buried there, so that by this time it was all turn'd into Dust.
But whether it was a ludicrous Dæmon, or Edward Avon's Ghost concerns not our Scope. It is sufficient that it is a certain Instance of a real Apparition, and I thought fit as in the former Story, so here to be so faithful as to conceal nothing that any might pretend to lessen the credibility thereof. Stories of the appearing of Souls departed are not for the Tooth of the Non-Conformists, who, as it is said, if they generally believe this, it must be from the undeniable
