s an axiom, the dread which false
religions all around and their terrible rituals must have inspired, the
superstitious tendencies of the people and their readiness to be misled,
we shall see ample reasons for treading out the first sparks of so
dangerous a fire.

Beyond this it is vain to pretend that the law of Moses goes. It was
right in declaring the sorcerer and the sorceress to be real and
dangerous phenomena. It never declared their pretensions to be valid
though illegitimate. And in one noteworthy passage it proclaims that a
real sign or a wonder could only proceed from God, and when it
accompanied false teaching was still a sign, though an ominous one,
implying that the Lord would prove them (Deut. xiii. 1-3). This does not
look very like an admission of the existence of rival powers, inferior
though they might be, who could interfere with the order of His world.

Sorcery in all its forms will die when men realise indeed that the world
is His, that there is no short or crooked way to the prizes which He
offers to wisdom and to labour, that these rewards are infinitely richer
and more splendid than the wildest dreams of magic, and that it is
literally true that all power, in earth as well as heaven, is committed
into the Hands which were pierced for us. In such a conception of the
universe, incantations give place to prayers, and prayer does not seek
to disturb, but to carry forward and to consummate, the orderly rule of
Love.

The denunciation of witchcraft is quite naturally followed, as we now
perceive, by the reiteration of the command that no sacrifice may be
offered to any god except Jehovah (20). Strange and hateful offerings
were an integral part of witchcraft, long before the hags of Macbeth
brewed their charm, or the child in Horace famished to yield a spell.

THE STRANGER.

xxii. 21, xxiii. 9.

Immediately after this, a ray of sunlight falls upon the sombre page.

We read an exhortation rather than a statute, which is repeated almost
literally in the next chapter, and in both is supported by a beautiful
and touching reason. "A stranger shalt thou not wrong, neither shall ye
oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." "A stranger
shall ye not oppress, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye
were strangers in the land of Egypt" (xxii. 21, xxiii. 9).

The "stranger" of these verses is probably the settler among them, as
distinguished from the traveller passing through the