d the days of witchcraft, that instead of
torturing, drowning, or burning the innocent, we give hospitality and
large pay to--the highly distinguished medium. At least we are safely
rid of certain horrors; but if the multitude--that "farraginous
concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages"--do not roll
back even to a superstition that carries cruelty in its train, it is not
because they possess a cultivated reason, but because they are pressed
upon and held up by what we may call an external reason--the sum of
conditions resulting from the laws of material growth, from changes
produced by great historical collisions shattering the structures of ages
and making new highways for events and ideas, and from the activities of
higher minds no longer existing merely as opinions and teaching, but as
institutions and organizations with which the interests, the affections,
and the habits of the multitude are inextricably interwoven. No
undiscovered laws accounting for small phenomena going forward under
drawing-room tables are likely to affect the tremendous facts of the
increase of population, the rejection of convicts by our colonies, the
exhaustion of the soil by cotton plantations, which urge even upon the
foolish certain questions, certain claims, certain views concerning the
scheme of the world, that can never again be silenced. If right reason
is a right representation of the co-existence and sequences of things,
here are co-existences and sequences that do not wait to be discovered,
but press themselves upon us like bars of iron. No seances at a guinea a
head for the sake of being pinched by "Mary Jane" can annihilate
railways, steamships, and electric telegraphs, which are demonstrating
the interdependence of all human interests, and making self-interest a
duct for sympathy. These things are part of the external Reason to which
internal silliness has inevitably to accommodate itself.

Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are well brought out
by Mr. Lecky. First, that the cruelties connected with it did not begin
until men's minds had ceased to repose implicitly in a sacramental system
which made them feel well armed against evil spirits; that is, until the
eleventh century, when there came a sort of morning dream of doubt and
heresy, bringing on the one side the terror of timid consciences, and on
the other the terrorism of authority or zeal bent on checking the rising
struggle. In that t