to have laid claim to supernatural powers. Empedocles indeed,
it is said, gave himself out to be a deity exiled from heaven, and was
apparently worshipped as such. According to a not very trustworthy
legend he threw himself into the crater of Mount Etna--perhaps in order
thus to solve the mystery of existence. Pythagoras is said by some to
have met his death at the hands of the people of Crotona, who set fire
to his house and burnt him alive with many of his disciples. Goethe
evidently alludes to Pythagoras (as well perhaps as to John Huss and
others who found their death at the stake) in some well-known lines,
which may be roughly thus translated:

The few that truth's deep mystery have learned
And could not keep it in their hearts concealed,
But to the mob their inner faith revealed,
Have evermore been crucified and burned.

We now come to Christianity. In the early ages of the Church the final
appeal seems to have been an appeal to miracles, and we find the
apostles and their followers claiming the sole right of working miracles
in the name of the one true God and anathematizing all other
wonder-workers as in league with Satan. We all remember Elymas the
Sorcerer struck blind by St. Paul, and the adversary of St. Peter, Simon
the Mage, around whom first gathered the myths which lived so long in
the popular imagination and many of which we shall meet with in the
legend of Dr. Faust.

This Simon, the Magus or Sorcerer, who bewitched the people of Samaria,
and was looked upon as 'the great power of God,' is said in the _Acts of
the Apostles_ to have been converted by St. Philip and to have brought
upon himself a severe rebuke from St. Peter for offering to purchase
with money the gift of wonder-working. In about the third century the
legend of Simon Magus, as related by Clement of Alexandria, seems to
have already incorporated in a mythical form the discords of the early
Church, and especially the feud between the Jewish Christians, followers
of St. Peter, and the Gentile proselytes, followers of St. Paul. Indeed
Simon the Sorcerer was in course of time regarded by some as having been
identical with St. Paul--that is to say, it was believed that St. Paul
had been none other but Simon Magus in disguise. The voice heard at St.
Paul's conversion and the light by which for a season he was struck
blind were alleged to have been feats of wizardry by which he, a wolf in
sheep's clothing, stole his way in