ote: French and
English legal proceedings.] The statute remained until 1736 unrepealed.
The French preceded the English in putting a stop to these atrocities;
for Louis XIV., A.D. 1672, by an order in council, forbade the tribunals
from inflicting penalty in accusations of sorcery.

Can the reader of the preceding paragraphs here pause without demanding
of himself the value of human testimony? All these delusions, which
occupied the minds of our forefathers, and from which not even the
powerful and learned were free, have totally passed away. [Sidenote: The
total disappearance of these delusions.] The moonlight has now no
fairies; the solitude no genius; the darkness no ghost, no goblin. There
is no necromancer who can raise the dead from their graves--no one who
has sold his soul to the Devil and signed the contract with his
blood--no angry apparition to rebuke the crone who has disquieted him.
Divination, agromancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, cheiromancy, augury,
interpreting of dreams, oracles, sorcery, astrology, have all gone. It
is 350 years since the last sepulchral lamp was found, and that was near
Rome. There are no gorgons, hydras, chimaeras; no familiars; no incubus
or succubus. The housewives of Holland no longer bring forth sooterkins
by sitting over lighted chauffers. No longer do captains buy of Lapland
witches favourable winds; no longer do our churches resound with prayers
against the baleful influences of comets, though there still linger in
some of our noble old rituals forms of supplication for dry weather and
rain, useless but not unpleasing reminiscences of the past. The
apothecary no longer says prayers over the mortar in which he is
pounding to impart a divine afflatus to his drugs. Who is there now that
pays fees to a relic or goes to a saint-shrine to be cured? These
delusions have vanished with the night to which they appertained, yet
they were the delusions of fifteen hundred years. In their support might
be produced a greater mass of human testimony than probably could be
brought to bear on any other matter of belief in the entire history of
man; and yet, in the nineteenth century, we have come to the conclusion
that the whole, from the beginning to the end, was a deception.
[Sidenote: Value of human testimony.] Let him, therefore, who is
disposed to balance the testimony of past ages against the dictates of
his own reason ponder on this strange history; let him who relies on the
authority of hu