to swallow swords,
to escape from locked handcuffs, and to perform the various cabinet
tricks, but cleverness does not alter the fact that after all it is
only deception cunningly contrived and performed in such a way as to
evade discovery. It appears right to many because it is called
"legerdemain" and "conjuring" but in reality it is exactly the same
thing as that by which the successful card-sharper strips his victims,
viz., such quickness of hand that the eye is deceived. Should we
encourage such artful devices? History tells many stories as to the
way in which people have been kept in superstitious bondage by
illusions and magic, and if it be now held to be right to deceive for
fun how can it be held to have been wrong to deceive for religion?
Those who made the people believe through practising deception
doubtless believed the trick to be less harmful than unbelief. I
contend, therefore, that people who go to see conjuring performances
derive no good from them, but that, on the contrary, they are apt to be
impressed with the idea that to practise deception is to show
praiseworthy skill. It is strange how many people pay money to others
to deceive them. More than ever before, people to-day actually enjoy
being cheated. If the tricks were clumsily devised and easily detected
there would be no attraction, but the cleverer and more puzzling the
trick the more eagerly people flock to see it.

Christian preachers and moralists could do well to take up this matter
and discourage people from frequenting the exhibitions of tricksters.
There are doubtless many laws in nature yet undiscovered, and a few
persons undoubtedly possess abnormal powers. This makes the
cultivation of the love of trickery the more dangerous. It prevents
the truth from being perceived. It enables charlatans to find dupes,
and causes the real magician to be applauded as a legerdemainist. This
is what the New Testament tells us happened in the case of Jesus
Christ. His miracles failed to convince because the people had for a
long time loved those who could deceive them cleverly.[1] The people
said to him, "Thou hast a devil," and others warned them after his
death saying, "That deceiver said while he was yet alive 'After three
days I will rise again.'" When people are taught not only to marvel at
the marvelous but to be indifferent to its falsehoods they lose the
power of discrimination, and are apt to take the true for the false,
the re