is to say, they erected an absolute system on a basis of isolated facts for which modern analysis as yet cannot account.  The Catholic Church, the law of the land, and modern philosophy, in agreement for once, combined to prescribe, persecute, and ridicule the mysteries of the Cabala as well as the adepts; the result is a lamentable interregnum of a century in occult philosophy.  But the uneducated classes, and not a few cultivated people (women especially), continue to pay a tribute to the mysterious power of those who can raise the veil of the future; they go to buy hope, strength, and courage of the fortune-teller; in other words, to ask of him all that religion alone can give.  So the art is still practised in spite of a certain amount of risk.  The eighteenth century encyclopaedists procured tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no longer amenable to a court of law, unless, indeed, he lends himself to fraudulent practices, and frightens his “clients” to extort money from them, in which case he may be prosecuted on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences.  Unluckily, the exercise of the sublime art is only too often used as a method of obtaining money under false pretences, and for the following reasons.

The seer’s wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are described by the epithets rough and uneducated.  The rough and uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we marvel.  From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise —­an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit.  Wherever mental power is imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, or the soldier’s toils of war; the fire within is apt to flash out in gleams of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden in an unpolished diamond.  Let the occasion come, and the spirit within kindles and glows, finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like power of beholding all things.  The coal of yesterday under the play of some mysterious influence becomes a radiant diamond.  Better educated people, many-sided and highly polished, continually giving out all that is in them, can never exhibit this supreme power, save by one of the miracles which God sometimes vouchsafes to work.  For this reason the soothsayer is almost always a beggar, whose mind is virgin soil, a creature coarse to all appearance, a pebble borne along the torrent of misery and left in the ruts of life, where it spends nothing of itself save in mere physical suffering.

The prophet, the seer, in short, is some Martin le Laboureur making a Louis XVIII. tremble by telling him a secret known only to the king himself; or it is a Mlle. Lenormand, or a domestic servant like Mme. Fontaine, or again, perhaps it is some half-idiotic negress, some herdsman living among his cattle, who receives the gift of vision; some Hindoo fakir, seated by a pagoda, mortifying the flesh till the spirit gains the mysterious power of the somnambulist.