rescribe, persecute, and ridicule the mysteries of the Cabala as well
as the adepts; the result is a lamentable interregnum of a century in
occult philosophy. But the uneducated classes, and not a few
cultivated people (women especially), continue to pay a tribute to the
mysterious power of those who can raise the veil of the future; they
go to buy hope, strength, and courage of the fortune-teller; in other
words, to ask of him all that religion alone can give. So the art is
still practised in spite of a certain amount of risk. The eighteenth
century encyclopaedists procured tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no
longer amenable to a court of law, unless, indeed, he lends himself to
fraudulent practices, and frightens his "clients" to extort money from
them, in which case he may be prosecuted on a charge of obtaining
money under false pretences. Unluckily, the exercise of the sublime
art is only too often used as a method of obtaining money under false
pretences, and for the following reasons.

The seer's wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are
described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and
uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at
which we marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise
--an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is
imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in
conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the
scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the
inventor, or the soldier's toils of war; the fire within is apt to
flash out in gleams of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden
in an unpolished diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within
kindles and glows, finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like
power of beholding all things. The coal of yesterday under the play of
some mysterious influence becomes a radiant diamond. Better educated
people, many-sided and highly polished, continually giving out all
that is in them, can never exhibit this supreme power, save by one of
the miracles which God sometimes vouchsafes to work. For this reason
the soothsayer is almost always a beggar, whose mind is virgin soil, a
creature coarse to all appearance, a pebble borne along the torrent of
misery and left in the ruts of life, where it spends nothing of itself
save in mere physical suffering.

The prophet, the seer, in short, is some _Mar