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unable to explain them, and then, as we are unable to give a satisfac- 

 tory explanation of them ourselves, we commonly consider we are bound 

 to accept his. And it is particularly in the countenance given to all 

 sorts of pseudo-professors that we are enabled to contrast the multitude 

 of to-day with that of days gone by. In Pompeii we see the shrine of 

 the goddess Isis, ar,d the contrivance by which her priests could give 

 a response apparently from the lips of divinity. We smile at the 

 superstition of the votaries, and think we are far better than they, till 

 we see by advertisement that some lady is coining from America who 

 will enable us to hold familiar discourse with Plato, Socrates, St. Paul, 

 Julius Caesar, St. Peter, and Sir Eobert Peel. A rap on the table 

 supplants the voice of the goddess, and the oracle is spelled letter by 

 letter, and knock after knock, rather than under the inspiration of a 

 feigned insanity, and by an audible voice. We smile at the conceit of 

 the prophets of Ahab, who, to please the king, told him to go on and 

 prosper ; and we ponder on the expression of one who declares before 

 God that he will be a lying spirit in the mouths of the false ones, 

 to bring about a particular end ; and we pity Ahab for believing what 

 he wished to come to pass, rather than what he knew would do so ; yet 

 we give credit for prophetic power to those spirit rappers who, whenever 

 they are wrong, complain of their inability to discriminate between their 

 lying and truth-telling visitors — a flimsy excuse for a transparent cheat. 

 There is not a schoolboy who does not pity the celebrated Pyrrhus, 

 King of Epirus, for sending to an oracle for directions, or some imlica- 

 tion of his policy, and who does not wonder that the very trans- 

 parency of the cheat did not open his eyes to the absurdity of trusting 

 to such prophecies as he received ; and yet that same schoolboy, when 

 he gi'ows to be a man, will himself believe in clairvoyance, and go to a 

 wise woman for information as to whether Sir John Franklin would 

 come back to England, or whether his own wife lost her purse in the 

 mud of a street or by the hand of a thief. We smile when we hear of 

 the King of Israel, who sent to Baal-Zebub to know whether he would 

 recover of his disease ; and yet some think that the individual who 

 sends a lock of hair to Alexis, the Parisian mesmerist, and demands 

 an account of his disease and cure, is in advance of his times. We 

 talk with " bated breath " of tlie credulity of Dr. Dee, who allowed 

 himself to be gulled by his ball of crystal and his man Kelly, and say 

 the world is wiser now ; yet we sympathise with electro-biologists, who 

 fancy they feel the rain because a professor wonders they do not put up 

 their umbrellas, or that they are statues because they are told they are 

 made of stone. * * -;' * ■■■ * 



The transition from a comparison between the mental condition of 



