ual skeleton. Among such serviceable
writers, Mr. Lecky's "History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of
Rationalism in Europe" entitles him to a high place. He has prepared
himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading;
he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives
proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness,
and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on
the history of Magic and Witchcraft, which opens the work, and to the two
chapters on the antecedents and history of Persecution, which occur, the
one at the end of the first volume, the other at the beginning of the
second. In these chapters Mr. Lecky has a narrower and better-traced
path before him than in other portions of his work; he is more occupied
with presenting a particular class of facts in their historical sequence,
and in their relation to certain grand tide-marks of opinion, than with
disquisition; and his writing is freer than elsewhere from an apparent
confusedness of thought and an exuberance of approximative phrases, which
can be serviceable in no other way than as diluents needful for the sort
of reader we have just described.

The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously chosen by Mr.
Lecky as the subject of his first section on the Declining Sense of the
Miraculous, because it is strikingly illustrative of a position with the
truth of which he is strongly impressed, though he does not always treat
of it with desirable clearness and precision, namely, that certain
beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against
them, but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of thought.
Here is his statement of the two "classes of influences" by which the
mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs
gradually modified:

"If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so
universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old
woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to
have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks
of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons
would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the
question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and found
it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does not