And for incoherent speech it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of prophecy, because the prophets of their oracles, intoxicated with a spirit or vapour from the cave of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, were for the time really mad, and spake like madmen; of whose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of

materia prima . In Scripture I find it also so taken (1 Sam. 18:10) in these words, “And the evil spirit came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house.”