573 



But while the ancients were thus ignorant of the actual existences 

 around them ; while they were unable to discover the circulation of the 

 blood in their own veins, they nevertheless far exceeded the moderns in 

 the extent and intimacy of their acquaintance with the supernatural, the 

 mysterious and the miraculous. Their astrologers, (if we are to believe 

 them,) could read the fate of each individual in the star or planet which pre- 

 sided over his birth; their priesthood could foretell the destiny of nations, 

 from the entrails of victims, the flight of birds, or the appearance of a comet. 

 Many of the virtues, and each of the vices, had its peculiar deity. The 

 earth and the air swarmed with gods and demons, who often conversed 

 with men, and frequently submitted to their will. And according to 

 the concurrent testimony of the divines of those days, through all the 

 middle ages, and down to the middle of the 15th centuiy, good and 

 evil spirits, not unfrequently appeared to men, and what was more for- 

 tunate, by the use of certain charms or talismans, the performance of 

 certain ceremonies, and especially by the repetition of a certain form of 

 words in the Latin tongue, they were easily rendered obedient to the 

 will of man ; and various other miracles were of frequent and public 

 occurrence. 



But unfortunately, and as a proof that the human mind is of limited 

 capacity, while the modems have made rapid improvement in the na- 

 tural sciences, their knowledge of the supernatural has wonderfully de- 

 clined. The valuable sciences of alchemy, astrology and demonology, 

 have become extinct. The invention of the printing press seems to 

 have withered them at a breath. Ghosts seem also to have taken the 

 alarm, and all, except a few of the more courageous, to have shrunk 

 back as at the approach of the rising sun. The witches, more disposed 

 to contest the field, maintained a short and sickly existence in Europe? 

 fled to New England, and yielded up their art and their lives upon the 

 scaftbld. And the power of working miracles, once so common, as of- 

 ten to be exhibited in public, and even upon the stage, is found to be rapidly 

 declining, and now we only hear of it at long intervals, exhibited to a 

 select few, in some obscure corner, some impenetrable fastness of the 

 mountains, where the press has seldom found access. 



The very existence of the press would seem to be incompatible 

 with any flourishing state of the supernatural sciences, ( ?) unless it 

 can be kept exclusively under the control of those whose mission it is. to 

 propagate them. 



