and more senseless than beasts
themselves.'[167]

[165] A modern philosopher has well illustrated this obvious
truth (_Natural History of Religion_, sect. xii.). 'The age
of superstition,' says an essayist of some notoriety, with
perfect truth, 'is not past; nor,' he adds, a more
questionable thesis, 'ought we to wish it past.' Some of the
most eminent writers (e.g. Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Bayle,
Addison) have rightly or wrongly agreed to consider
fanatical superstition more pernicious than atheism. When it
is considered that the scientific philosophy of Aristotle,
of more than 2,000 years ago, was revived at a comparatively
recent date, it may be difficult not to believe in a
_cyclic_ rather than really progressive course of human
ideas, at least in metaphysics. The fact, remarked by
Macaulay, that the two principal sections of Christendom in
Europe remain very nearly in the limits in which they were
in the sixteenth, or in the middle of the seventeenth
century, is incontestable. Nor, indeed, are present facts
and symptoms so adverse, as is generally supposed, to the
probability of an ultimate reaction in favour of Catholic
doctrine and rule, even among the Teutonic peoples, in the
revolutions to which human ideas are continually subject.

[166] Among the numerous evidences of recent travellers may
be specially mentioned that of the well-known traveller R. F.
Burton (_The Lake Regions of Central Africa_) for the
practices of the Eastern Africans. On the African continent
and elsewhere, as was the case amongst the ancient Jews, the
demons are propitiated by human sacrifices. To what extent
witch-superstition obtains among the Hindus, the historian of
British India bears witness. 'The belief of witchcraft and
sorcery,' says Mr. Mill, 'continues universally prevalent,
and is every day the cause of the greatest enormities. It not
unfrequently happens that Brahmins tried for murder before
the English judges assign as their motive to the crime that
the murdered individual had enchanted them. No fewer than
five unhappy persons in one district were tried and executed
for witchcraft so late as the year 1792. The villagers
themselves assume the right of sitting in judgment on this
imaginary offence, and their sole instruments of proof are
the most wretched of all incantations (_History of British
India_, book ii. 7). A certain instinctive or t