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consciousness, and with rudimentary political organization. Where there is little restraint on personal freedom, there is small sense of moral responsibility, and few acts are admitted to be criminal; consequently, every man is respectable enough to merit future happiness. As the sense of responsibility forms, and the idea of morality acquires precision, men adopt views of eternal happiness which would be incompatible with the admission into it of all men without some purgation to rid them of offensive habits, disorderly passions, evil humours, which would make eternity an endless scene of irritations and quarrels. The third view is that life is the time of probation, and that the eternal condition is fixed by man's conduct during life. This theory leads to the somewhat startling consequence that endless punishments are exacted for crimes committed, possibly, without premeditation. The last theory, that of the resurrection of the body and its union with a purified soul, is peculiarly Christian.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has exercised a tremendous influence, not only in leading man towards civilization, but also in restraining him from advance. That it should have an elevating tendency is obvious, but that it should have a degrading tendency is not so clear. The reason of this latter influence is, that upon this doctrine has been erected a vast superstructure of angelology and demonology.

There are several theories to account for angels and devils, but, among a vast number of nations, the angels are the souls of the good, and the devils are those of the bad. A modern writer who has deeply studied the savage races of man observes: "Their religions have not acted as levers to raise them into civilization, but have rather worked, and

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that powerfully, to impede every step in advance; in the first place, by ascribing everything unintelligible in nature to spiritual agency, and then, by making the fate of man dependent on mysterious and capricious forces, not on his own skill and foresight."1

This is perfectly true, because these religions have been steeped in spirit-worship, and saturated with sorcery, which is the conjuration of spirits.

Necromancy is the shadow of religion. The priest was the philosopher of the early religions. The sorcerer sought to stamp out speculation. Religion pointed to an ideal, but the only ideal of which witchcraft knew was an ideal of horror. Thus, instinctively, religion and sorcery, the worship of good and the conjuration of evil, became antagonistic. The Jewish law forbade witch and sorcerer to live. The Norseman drew a sack over the head of the dealer with familiar spirits, and precipitated him from a cliff. The twelve tables denounced the Roman saga; the adorer of divs, or demons, was accursed by the Mazdæan, and S. Paul warned the early Christians against "the worshipping of spirits" and "the doctrines of demons."

The belief in demons is but another form of the belief in the disembodied spirits of the departed. At a time when every man's hand was against his fellow, the characteristic of the human soul was cunning, cruelty, and envy. Souls, when freed from the body, were supposed to retain their cunning, cruelty, and envy. The ancestral souls of the King of Dahomey shake the earth because the old customs of steeping the soil in human gore are not kept up. The Arkansas Indians burn lodge and all its contents over a corpse, in their dread of its malice. The Algonquins carry it forth by a hole cut opposite the door, and beat the walls 1 Waitz: Anthropologie des Naturvölker, i. 459.

with sticks to frighten away the lingering ghost. Buryingplaces were always avoided with fear. The Scandinavians believed that the dead fattened in their cairns on the blood of those they nightly slew. I quote from a recent work on Bulgaria an example of the mode in which the spirit of the dead becomes transformed in popular belief into a demon;1

"When a man who has vampire blood in his veins (for this condition is not only epidemic and endemic, but hereditary), or who is otherwise predisposed to become a vampire, dies, nine days after his burial he returns to upper earth in an aëriform shape. The presence of the vampire in this his first condition may be easily discerned in the dark by a succession of sparks like those from a flint and steel-in the light, by a shadow projected upon a wall, and varying in density according to the age of the vampire in his career. In this stage he is comparatively harmless, and is only able to play the practical jokes of the German Kobold and Gnome, of the Irish Phooka, or the English Puck; he roars in a terrible voice, or amuses himself by calling out the inhabitants of a cottage by the most endearing terms and then beating them black and blue. The father of our servant Theodore was a vampire of this class. One night he seized by the waist (for vampires are capable of exercising considerable physical force) Kodja Keraz, the Pehlivan, or champion wrestler of Derekuoi, crying out, Now then, old Cherry-tree, see if you can throw me.' The village champion put forth all his strength, but the vampire was so heavy that Kodja Keraz broke his own jaw in throwing the invisible being who was crushing him to death. At the time of this occurrence, five years ago, our village was so infested by vampires that the inhab

1 "Residence in Bulgaria," by Captain S. Clair and Charles Brophy; London, 1869.

itants were forced to assemble together in two or three houses, to burn candles all night, and to watch by turns in order to avoid the assaults of the Obours, who lit up the streets with their sparkles, and of whom the most enterprising threw their shadow on the walls of the room where the peasants were dying of fear; whilst others howled, shrieked, and swore outside the door, entered the abandoned houses, spat blood into the floor, turned everything topsyturvy, and smeared the whole place, even the pictures of the saints, with cow-dung."

But when the homicidal mania which infects savages subsided, these malevolent spirits were classed apart from human souls, which were not now always supposed to raven for slaughter, and thus the human spirits of their ancestry came to be regarded as a distinct species of spirits, i.e. demons. Man regarded himself as living in the midst of an invisible world of spiritual beings, by whom he was influenced, and his destiny was swayed. These beings he regarded as controlling the elements, and disturbing the flow of natural law. They had to be conjured not to injure, or warded off with amulets. The conjuration of fiends and the fabrication of amulets became the occupation of a class. And thus arose the necromancer and witch. The necromancer and the witch were the hierophants of evil, as the priest and the vestal were the celebrants of good. Hulda was prophetess in the temple, and in Endor lurked a witch. The priest sacrificed to God, the magician immolated to Satan. The fears of the ignorant created this order of spiritconjurers. He dared not face the darkness which his terror had peopled with hideous shapes. Fancy made him believe that the dead arose from their graves and prowled about, thirsty for blood; that they swept the plains in the shape of wolves, with lupine rage and lust; that they wavered as

sheeted ghosts in the gloom of the forest; that they danced on the moonlit turf; jabbered at his window, shrieked in at his door, squatted on his breast at night. Every Christian churchyard, every American bone-mound, every Siberian tumulus, every Hindu place of burning, every Egyptian tomb, is haunted by spectres. Man lives in perpetual dread of their power. The sun sets, and he flies to his home, and shuts himself within and bars his fears out. If he is obliged to stir abroad in the night, he treads stealthily with the utmost circumspection, and with ear on the alert. He mutters incantations, clasps amulets, starts at the rustle of the leaves, and shivers at the growl of a beast. He is a ready prey to the schaman, the enchanter, or the witch, whom his fears have summoned to his aid. Sir Walter Scott deduces demonology from the same origin: "The general, or, it may be termed, the universal belief of the inhabitants of the earth in the existence of spirits separated from the encumbrance and incapacities of the body, is grounded on the consciousness of the divinity that speaks in our own bosoms, and demonstrates to all men, except the few who are hardened to the celestial voice, that there is within us a portion of the divine substance, which is not subject to the law of death and dissolution, but which, where the body is no longer fit for its abode, shall seek its own place, as a sentinel dismissed from his post. Unaided by revelation, it cannot be hoped that mere earthly reason should be able to form any rational or precise conjecture concerning the destination of the soul when parted from the body; but the conviction that such an indestructible essence exists, the belief expressed by the poet in a different sense, non omnis moriar, must infer the existence of many millions of spirits, who have not been annihilated, though they have become invisible to mortals, who still see,

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