eld similar views is
no matter for surprise. They were children of their age.

Religion and magic were long bound up with one another. It is useless
to ask which came first, for they are not mutually exclusive in the
beginning. Only as an ethical monotheism, with a high respect for the
personality and power of the deity worshiped, develops, is the magical
element rejected. There are few religions, even to-day, which do not
contain magical elements, and the farther back in time we go, the more
conspicuous is the presence of incantations and ritual acts imputed to
have a mysterious efficacy. Man had sore need of help, and so he
adopted all the means which accident, fancy and ignorance suggested.
If certain acts gave him the _mana_ of his god or brought pressure to
bear upon a supernatural agent, so much the better. Much of early
liturgy is a mingling of spell and prayer, and it is strictly true that
much of Christian liturgy bears traces of this origin. The following
example shows this intertwining of higher and lower elements: In the
blessing of the baptismal water on the eve of Epiphany, a custom
prevalent in the earlier Church {54} of Rome, the priest, while praying
to God to sanctify the water, dipped a crucifix thrice into it,
recalling in his prayer the miracle described in Exodus, the sweetening
of the bitter water with wood; then followed antiphonal singing
describing Christ's baptism in Jordan, which sanctified the water. "We
appear to have here," writes L. D. Farnell, "a combination of the great
typical forms of the immemorial religious energy, prayer pure and
simple, the potent use of the spiritually charged object, the fetish
(in this case the crucifix), and an intoned or chanted narrative which
has the spell-value of suggestion."

It has been suggested by certain investigators that magic is nearer
science than religion. It is the attempt of man to compel things to do
what he desires. In religion, on the other hand, man proclaims his
helplessness and his utter dependence upon spiritual powers. There can
be little doubt that this difference exists and comes more and more to
the front. But it is not until religion evolves into spiritual prayer
and communion and away from ritual processes that the separation takes
place. Few events are more interesting than the gradual rejection of
magic by religion. But does not this rejection involve a similar
rejection of science? Here, again, we meet the inevi