heir father during the lifetime
of their grandfather," an equal number of equal combatants is chosen for
each side; they fight; the champions of the children prevail, and
therefore the law is fixed in their favour. A relic of some martyr is
bought at a great price; no one seeks to criticize the channel through
which it has come, but every one asks, Can it work a miracle? A vast
institution demands the implicit obedience of all men. It justifies its
claim, not by the history of the past, but by promises and threats of
the future. A decrepit crone is suspected of witchcraft. She is stripped
naked and thrown into the nearest pond: if she sinks, she is innocent;
if she swims, she is in commerce with the Devil. In all such cases the
intrinsic peculiarity of the logic is obvious enough; it shows a
complete misconception of the nature of evidence. [Sidenote: Its
adoption of supernaturalism.] Yet this ratiocination governed Europe for
a thousand years, giving birth to those marvellous and supernatural
explanations of physical phenomena and events upon which we now look
back with unfeigned surprise, half disbelieving that it was possible for
our ancestors to have credited such things. [Sidenote: The Jews and
Saracens destroy supernaturalism.] Against this preposterous logic the
Mohammedans and Jews struck the first blows. We have already heard what
Algazzali the Arabian says respecting the enchanter who would prove that
three are more than ten by changing a stick into a serpent. The
circumstances under which the Jewish physicians acted we shall consider
presently.

It will not be useless to devote a little space to this belief in the
supernatural. It offers an opportunity of showing how false notions may
become universal, embody themselves in law and practical life, and
wonderful to be said, how they may, without anything being done to
destroy them, vanish from sight of themselves, like night-spectres
before the day. At present we only encounter them among the lowest
peasant grades, or among those who have been purposely kept in the most
abject state of ignorance. Less than a century ago the clergy of Spain
wished to have the Opera prohibited, because that ungodly entertainment
had given rise to a want of rain; but now, in a country so
intellectually backward as that--a witch was burnt there so lately as
A.D. 1781--such an attempt would call up sly wit, and make the rabble of
Madrid suspect that the archbishop was smarting under