ost was given. To complain of Moses for proscribing false
religions would be to denounce the use of glass for seedlings because
the full-grown plant flourishes in the open air.

Now, it would have been preposterous to proscribe false religions and
yet to tolerate the sorcerer and the sorceress. For these were the
active practitioners of another worship than that of God. They might not
profess idolatry; but they offered help and guidance from sources which
Jehovah frowned upon, rival sources of defence or knowledge.

The holy people was meant to grow up under the most elevating of all
influences, reliance upon a protecting God, Who had bidden His children
to subdue the world as well as to replenish it, and of Whom one of their
own poets sang that He had put all things under the feet of man. Their
true heritage was not bounded by the strip of land which Joshua and his
followers slowly conquered; to them belonged all the resources of nature
which science, ever since, has wrested from the Philistine hands of
barbarism and ignorance. And this nobler conquest depended upon the
depth and sincerity of man's feeling that the world is well-ordered and
stable and the heritage of man, not a chaos of various and capricious
powers, where Pallas inspires Diomed to hunt Venus bleeding off the
field, or where the incantations of Canidia may disturb the orderly
movements of the skies. Who could hope to discover by inductive science
the secrets of such a world as this?

The devices of magic cut the links between cause and effect, between
studious labour and the fruits which sorcery bade men to steal rather
than to cultivate. What gambling was to commerce, that was witchcraft to
philosophy, and the mischief no more depended on the validity of its
methods than upon the soundness of the last device for breaking the bank
at Monte Carlo.

If one could actually extort their secrets from the dead, or win for
luxury and sloth a longer life than is bestowed upon temperance and
labour, he would succeed in his revolt against the God of nature. But
the revolt was the endeavour; and the sorcerer, however falsely,
professed to have succeeded; and preached the same revolt to others. In
religion he was therefore an apostate, and in the theocracy a traitor
against the King, one whose life was forfeited if it was prudent to
exact the penalty.

And when we consider the fascination wielded by such pretensions, even
in ages when the stability of nature i