world in its gentler
moments seems to take a peculiar thrill of delight from these travellers,
perhaps realizing what has been lost from parting with such gentle seers
and secular diviners. Every Christmas half the magazines set them forth
in richest colors, riding across the desert, following the star to the
same manger where the shepherds are depicted.

Those wizard kings, whatever useless charms and talismans they wore,
stood for the unknown quantity in spiritual life. A magician is a man who
lays hold on the unseen for the mere joy of it, who steals, if necessary,
the holy bread and the sacred fire. He is often of the remnant of an
ostracized and disestablished priesthood. He is a free-lance in the
soul-world, owing final allegiance to no established sect. The fires of
prophecy are as apt to descend upon him as upon members of the
established faith. He loves the mysterious for the beauty of it, the
wildness and the glory of it, and not always to compel stiff-necked
people to do right.

It seems to me that the scientific and poetic functions of society should
make common cause again, if they are not, as in Merlin's time, combined
in one personality. They must recognize that they serve the same society,
but with the understanding that the prophetic function is the most
important, the wizard vocation the next, and the inventors' and realists'
genius important indeed, but the third consideration. The war between the
scientists and the prophet-wizards has come about because of the
half-defined ambition of the scientists to rule or ruin. They give us the
steam-engine, the skyscraper, the steam-heat, the flying machine, the
elevated railroad, the apartment house, the newspaper, the breakfast
food, the weapons of the army, the weapons of the navy, and think that
they have beautified our existence.

Moreover some one rises at this point to make a plea for the scientific
imagination. He says the inventor-scientists have brought us the mystery
of electricity, which is no hocus-pocus, but a special manifestation of
the Immanent God within us and about us. He says the student in the
laboratory brought us the X-ray, the wireless telegraph, the mystery of
radium, the mystery of all the formerly unharnessed power of God which
man is beginning to gather into the hollow of his hand.

The one who pleads for the scientific imagination points out that Edison
has been called the American Wizard. All honor to Edison and his kind.
And