y in occult philosophy. But the
uneducated classes, and not a few cultivated people (women especially),
continue to pay a tribute to the mysterious power of those who can raise
the veil of the future; they go to buy hope, strength, and courage of
the fortune-teller; in other words, to ask of him all that religion
alone can give. So the art is still practised in spite of a certain
amount of risk. The eighteenth century encyclopaedists procured
tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no longer amenable to a court of law,
unless, indeed, he lends himself to fraudulent practices, and frightens
his "clients" to extort money from them, in which case he may be
prosecuted on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences.
Unluckily, the exercise of the sublime art is only too often used as a
method of obtaining money under false pretences, and for the following
reasons.

The seer's wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are
described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and uneducated
are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we
marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise--an Apostle
Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is imprisoned,
and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation,
in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the
efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, or the
soldier's toils of war; the fire within is apt to flash out in gleams
of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden in an unpolished
diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within kindles and glows,
finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like power of beholding
all things. The coal of yesterday under the play of some mysterious
influence becomes a radiant diamond. Better educated people, many-sided
and highly polished, continually giving out all that is in them, can
never exhibit this supreme power, save by one of the miracles which God
sometimes vouchsafes to work. For this reason the soothsayer is almost
always a beggar, whose mind is virgin soil, a creature coarse to all
appearance, a pebble borne along the torrent of misery and left in the
ruts of life, where it spends nothing of itself save in mere physical
suffering.

The prophet, the seer, in short, is some _Martin le Laboureur_ making
a Louis XVIII. tremble by telling him a secret known only to the king
himself; or it is a Mlle. Lenormand, or