he popular
one of drowning or suffocating in the nearest pond. Scraps
of written papers found in the hovel of the murdered wizard
revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and
other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of
the 'Black Art' in Southern Europe already referred to, the
inquisition at Rome upon a well-known English or American
'spiritualist,' when, as we learn from himself, he was
compelled to make a solemn abjuration that he had not
surrendered his soul to the devil, is significant.

Nor would it be safe to assume, with some writers, that
diabolism, as a vulgar prejudice, is now entirely extirpated from
Protestant Christendom, and survives only in the most orthodox
countries of Catholicism or in the remoter parts of northern or
eastern Europe. Superstition, however mitigated, exists even in
the freer Protestant lands of Europe and America; and if
Protestants are able to smile at the religious creeds or
observances of other sects, they may have, it is probable,
something less pernicious, but perhaps almost as absurd, in their
own creed.[165] But, after a despotism of fifteen centuries,
Christendom has at length thrown off the hellish yoke, whose
horrid tyranny was satiated with innumerable holocausts. The once
tremendous power of the infernal arts is remembered by the higher
classes of society of the present age only in their proverbial
language, but it is indelibly graven in the common literature of
Europe. With the savage peoples of the African continent and of
the barbarous regions of the globe, witchcraft or sorcery, under
the name of Fetishism, flourishes with as much vigour and with as
destructive effects as in Europe in the sixteenth century; and
every traveller returning from Eastern or Western Africa, or from
the South Pacific, testifies to the prevalence of the practice of
horrid and bloody rites of a religious observance consisting of
charms and incantations. With those peoples that have no further
conception of the religious sentiment there obtains for the most
part, at least, the magical use of sorcery.[166] Superstition,
ever varying, at some future date may assume, even in Europe, a
form as pernicious or irrational as any of a past or of the
present age; for in every age 'religion, which should most
distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate
us as rational creatures above brutes, is that wherein men
often appear most irrational