have burnt him, too, in their hardly logical way of saving souls, only he recanted, and, sorely against his will, said that it was all an “illusion.”  But the pope and his advisers had an illusion, too, which was, that dressing up men who did not believe in their faith, in garments on which flames and devils were represented—­such a garment they called a san benito—­and then burning them, was really something done for the glory of God.  They called it with admirable satire an auto da fe (an “act of faith"), and they really did believe—­for many of the inquisitors were mistaken but tender men—­that they did good by this; but surely now they have outgrown this illusion.  How many of these have we yet to outgrow; how far are we off the true and liberal Christianity which is the ideal of the saint and sage; how ready are we still to persecute those who happen, by mere circumstances attending their birth and education, to differ from us!

The inner world of man, no less than the external world, is full of illusions.  They arise from distorted vision, from a disorder of the senses, or from an error of judgment upon data correctly derived from their evidence.  Under the influence of a predominant train of thought, an absorbing emotion, a person ready charged with an uncontrolled imagination will see, as Shakspeare has it—­

    “More devils than vast hell can hold.”

Half, if not all, of the ghost stories, which are equally dangerous and absorbing to youth, arise from illusion—­there they have their foundation; but believers in them obstinately refuse to believe anything but that which their overcharged and predisposed imagination leads them to.  Some of us walk about this world of ours—­as if it were not of itself full enough of mystery—­as ready to swallow any thing wonderful or horrible, as the country clown whom a conjurer will get upon his stage to play tricks with.  Fooled by a redundant imagination, delighted to be tricked by her potency, we dream away, flattered by the idea that a supernatural messenger is sent to us, and to us alone.  We all have our family ghosts, in whom we more than half believe.  Each one of us has a mother or a wise aunt, or some female relation, who, at one period of her life, had a dream, difficult to be interpreted, and foreboding good or evil to a child of the house.

We are so grand, we men, “noble animals, great in our deaths and splendid even in our ashes,” that we can not yield to a common fate without some overstrained and bombast conceit that the elements themselves give warning.  Casca, in “Julius Caesar,” rehearses some few of the prodigies which predicted Caesar’s death: