HISTORY OF MAGIC.

simplest among the people will be able to understand it and, if necessary, demonstrate it.

It will, however, never become vulgar; because it is hierarchical and because anarchy alone flatters the prejudices of the crowd. The masses do not need absolute truths, otherwise progress would stop and life would cease in humanity. The back-and-forth of contrary ideas, the clash of opinions, the fashions of thought determined always by the dreams of the moment are necessary for the intellectual growth of nations. The crowds feel this well, and that is why they so willingly abandon the chair of the doctors to run to the charlatan's stage. Even the men who are thought to occupy themselves specifically with philosophy almost always resemble those children who play at proposing riddles to each other, and who hasten to put out of the game the one who knows the answer in advance, for fear that he might prevent them from playing by removing all interest from the confusion of their questions.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," said eternal wisdom. Purity of heart therefore purifies the intelligence, and the rectitude of the will creates the accuracy of the understanding. He who prefers truth and justice above all else will have justice and truth as his reward, for supreme Providence has given us freedom so that we can conquer life. Truth itself, however rigorous it may be, only imposes itself gently and never does violence to the slowness or the wanderings of our will when it is seduced by the attractions of falsehood.

However, as Bossuet Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, a French bishop and theologian known for his oratory. says, "before there is

INTRODUCTION.

anything that pleases or displeases our senses, there is a truth; and it is by it alone that our actions must be regulated, not by our pleasure." The kingdom of God is not the empire of the arbitrary, neither for men nor for God himself. "A thing," says Saint Thomas Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian., "is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just." The divine balance governs and necessitates eternal mathematics. "God has made everything with number, weight, and measure." It is the Bible that speaks here. Measure a corner of creation and perform a proportionally progressive multiplication, and the entire infinite will multiply its circles filled with universes that will pass in proportional segments between the ideal and growing branches of your compass. Now suppose that from any point of the infinite above you a hand holds another compass or a square, the lines of the celestial triangle will necessarily meet those of the compass of science to form the mysterious Star of Solomon The hexagram or six-pointed star..

"You shall be measured," says the Gospel, "with the measure you use yourselves." God does not enter into a struggle with man to crush him with his greatness, and he never places unequal weights in his balance. When he wants to exercise the strength of Jacob, he takes the form of a man, whose assault the patriarch endures for a whole night. The end of this combat is a blessing for the defeated, and with the glory of having sustained such an antagonism, the national title of Israel, which is to say, a name that means: "strong against God."

We have heard Christians, more zealous than learned, explain in a strange way the dogma of