of those who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The
secular priests generally refused to say the Mass of the Holy Spirit; but the monks, especially the Capuchin friars, had the reputation
of yielding with less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious and distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to
be laid by the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact counterpart of the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their
magicians. Again, to take another example, in many villages of Provence the priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of averting
storms. It is not every priest who enjoys this reputation; and in some villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the parishion-
ers are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the power (pouder), as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy storm they put
him to the proof by inviting him to exorcise the threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their hopes, the new shepherd is
assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock. In some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this respect stood higher
than that of his rector, the relations between the two have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had to translate the
rector to another benefice. Again, Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes
induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Secaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do
know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite
sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch,
can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Secaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted
church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the
desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble
the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black
and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant
has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which
no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the
mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it.
They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Secaire.
Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such wants as transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first place a consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and
religion may incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the history of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary processes of the mind, namely the association
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of ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity; and that on the other hand religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal
agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex than a
simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a theory which assumes that the course of nature is determined by
conscious agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection,
than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts associate the ideas
of things that are like each other or that have been found together in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if
they ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible
animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume
that the honour of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human reason. Thus, if magic be deduced immediately
from elementary processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests
on conceptions which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic
arose before religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and
enchantments before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.
The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.
But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase, that they attempted to force the great powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of courting their favour by offerings and prayer--in short that, just as on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been an Age of Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere been an Age of Magic? There are reasons for answering this question in the affirmative. When we survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but descend into the minuter subdivi-
sions of states and commonwealths, nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that the surface of
society all over the world is cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses opened up by the
disintegrating influence of religious dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which affect mainly the
intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement among
the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind. One of the great
achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus
to discover