look upon it as absurd; and that this new tone of
thought appeared, first of all, in those who were least subject to
theological influences, and soon spread through the educated laity, and,
last of all, took possession of the clergy."

We have rather painful proof that this "second class of influences," with
a vast number go hardly deeper than Fashion, and that witchcraft to many
of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers' gigs are
absurd. It is felt preposterous to think of spiritual agencies in
connection with ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it
is known that mediums of communication with the invisible world are
usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, who soar
above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, and who are not given to
unprofitable intrigues. The enlightened imagination rejects the figure
of a witch with her profile in dark relief against the moon and her
broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no
names of "respectable" witnesses, are invoked to make us feel our
presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that obsolete old
woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered laws, and the witnesses
qualified by the payment of income tax, are all in favor of a different
conception--the image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails
foreshortened against the cornice. Yet no less a person than Sir Thomas
Browne once wrote that those who denied there were witches, inasmuch as
they thereby denied spirits also, were "obliquely and upon consequence a
sort, not of infidels, but of atheists." At present, doubtless, in
certain circles, unbelievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by
means of undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism; illiberal as it
is not to admit that mere weakness of understanding may prevent one from
seeing how that phenomenon is necessarily involved in the Divine origin
of things. With still more remarkable parallelism, Sir Thomas Browne
goes on: "Those that, to refute their incredulity, desire to see
apparitions, shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to
be so much as witches. The devil hath made them already in a heresy as
capital as witchcraft, _and to appear to them were but to convert them_."
It would be difficult to see what has been changed here, but the mere
drapery of circumstance, if it were not for this prominent difference
between our own days an