associated with the religious idea must eventually drop out. The solid and enduring will not suffer thereby. Religion will be called upon to part with much that men have closely bound up with it. "Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure." The experimental and progressive sciences are steadily gaining ground, and doing much to ameliorate and improve the condition of society. It will not be denied that about every phase of modern life has its forbidding aspects-in some cases almost sickening aspects-that seem to defy cure. These aspects are all discerned; they are unsparingly criticized, unreservedly condemned; their fate is sealed. Prolonged and difficult will be the march of humanity, in America, to the higher levels that the best minds hope for, but they will be reached. It may be said of this time that never before were the evils of life more plainly discerned, criticized and condemned; never before were the possibilities of life more clearly perceived, pointed out and urged, as the natural as well as possible attainment of man. "Our fathers to their graves have gone, Which rises in their honored place, A moral warfare with the crime And folly of an evil time. So let it be. In God's own might We gird us for the coming fight, And, strong in Him whose cause is ours In conflict with unholy powers, We grasp the weapons He has given, The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven." Ransom A. Greene. 66 ARTICLE XVII. The Faust Legend. THE word "magic," etymologically, points back to the time when men deified the powers of Nature. It takes rɔot in the Persian word "magi." Under the Persian empire the magi" rose to the very highest importance. They were, in the early days of the empire, the wise men, the philosophers, the servants of God. They were also the diviners, augurs, jugglers, astrologers. During the Babylonian captivity, the Jews came in contact with this Persian religion, and soon after wrought out, under its influence, "a classification and nomenclature of supernatural beings, good and bad, angels and demons." "In the later books of the Old Testament," says Max Muller, "and in all the passages of the New Testament where the power of evil is spoken of as a person, we may admit the influence of Persian ideas and Persian expressions; though," he says, "strict proof is by no means easy." The magic books of the Middle Ages contain the remains of these Jewish theurgic systems. The theurgy of these ages is strongly marked by these Jewish magical speculations, and what we find of magic in medieval and modern Europe is a mixture of Jewish and Pagan elements. It is a Pagan religious conception flowing through Jewish channels. There is reason to think that in their passage through this foreign medium these conceptions were much distorted; but that point is not relevant to our subject. These Jewish theurgic systems were among the phases of religious thought which Christianity met when it began its career on the earth. It did not obliterate from the popular mind this faith in magic as one might think it ought to have done. It did not do this for very good reasons. First, because faith in the Old Testament miracles was held to be a part of Christian duty. The early Apostles founded their faith in Christ and in his divine mission upon the Old Testament Scriptures, and held as devoutly as the Jew to faith in all its miracles. Aside from that, the authority of Jesus as a teacher sent from God was predicated upon his miraculous works. His miracles were his full and sufficient credentials as the Son of God, the Messiah of the Old Testament. In addition to these facts Christianity gathered recruits from all the nations with which it came in contact. It was not easy for the untaught, undisciplined mind, already under the influence of a strong faith in supernatural appearances in heaven and earth, or supernatural interpositions in the affairs of men, to separate those of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures from those with which they were already acquainted in their ancient and local religions. It was the policy of the church from the first to found its membership upon faith in Jesus as the Christ. All, out of any nation, who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and worked the works of righteousness were accepted of the church. The very spirit with which Christianity started out to the conquest of the world hindered it from laying too much stress upon minor and more unimportant points of belief. These reasons hindered the church from stamping out even in its own membership a belief in magic. Andrew D. White, in the Popular Science Monthly for August, 1887, says: "Faith in the miracles of Christianity seemed to increase rather than to diminish faith in the miracles of Paganism." "The church," he says, "began at last to admit the pagan miracles, but ascribed them to satan. Not until late in the seventeenth century did the substantial truth of this dogma begin to be questioned." It is true, nevertheless, that the church arrayed herself in opposition to the pagan belief in magic, and did strongly endeavor to fortify men's minds against the influence of a belief calculated to produce such unhappy results. Falling back upon the old Jewish classification and nomenclature, in which the Apostles were thoroughly indoctrinated, the church declared that magic was the work of satan, and as such was to be held as false, and shunned as a sin against God. Thus gradually grew up, even in the church, the notion that all who wrought in magic were given over to the devil, body and soul, for this life and for the next. The condition of society during the Middle Ages, when belief in magic was held most generally and most tenaciously, was peculiar. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries covered a period of strange transition. No period in the world's history is more intensely interesting. It was the time of the revival of Greek learning, the invention of printing, of the mariner's compass, of gunpowder, of the manufacture of paper. Then appear in history such names as Nettesheim, Columbus, Luther, Copernicus, Savonarola, Bruno, Paracelsus, Reuchlin. Beginning with Huss, who was the John the Baptist of the Protestant Reformation, crying in the mountain fastnesses of Bohemia, and who died in 1415, the above are the names that follow. They are all names of men remarkable in some of the many paths of active life. They all lived and labored within the one hundred and fifty years stretching between 1450 and 1600. Their names serve to show to the student of history the spirit of intellectual activity, research, and inquiry which was abroad in continental Europe. The light which spread over Europe at this date dawned in Italy. But underneath the surface of the "brilliant social culture" thus indicated to us "lurked gross appetites and savage passions, unrestrained by medieval piety, untutored by modern experience." Italian society exhibited an almost unexampled spectacle of literary, artistic and courtly refinement crossed by brutalities of lust, treasons, poisonings, assassinations, and violence." In this lower social stratum a belief in magic flourished like roses in June, or more truly, perhaps, like tadpoles in a puddle. The church, in her attempt to control or rectify this popular mistaken idea of things, turned the whole thing over to satan. All magic was the work of the devil. Untaught people were terrified at the doom she pronounced against magic-workers. Awed by "the massive vengeance" of the church, unable to discriminate, ignorant of many of Nature's simplest laws, hedged in on every side by superstition and stupidity, a belief in hell haunting the conscience like a nightmare, is it any wonder that a belief in a supernaturalism as gross as was ever imagined should take root and grow to terrible proportions among the people of the commoner classes? 66 This belief in supernaturalism either came down in two streams, or else divided somewhere along the stream into two channels. For the sake both of distinction and convenience, we may name these the Philosophic and the Religious channels, or streams. Within the Philosophic channel, giving it vitality and momentum, one will find such names as Sir Michael Scott, who died in 1291, Pope Sylvester, who held the papal power from 999 to 1003, Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, Bruno, Roger Bacon, all of them men distinguished for philosophic and scientific research, well versed in astrology and alchemy,which constituted the science of the age,-in medicine, and in all the learning of the time. This was a period when, owing to the dense ignorance of the people, "any persons who had penetrated more deeply than ordinary mortals into the mysteries of Nature, or of man's relation to Nature, were believed to be endowed with supernatural power, and were regarded with fear as inspired by the devil, or by veneration as miracleworkers." All these men mentioned above were regarded as magicians, or miracle-workers, and as being in league with satan. They all suffered religious persecution as devil-inspired; were excommunicated from the church; all good and holy people were warned to have nothing to do with them ; they were forbidden to teach in the schools; forbidden to write, or promulgate anything which had not first been submitted to the Index Expurgatorius; all because they were believed to be in league with the great arch-enemy of human souls. But, unhappily for its own consistency and also for its success against the popular faith, in the meantime the church had its own legends, faith in which was the bounden duty of its entire membership. To this category belonged, undoubtedly, the original of the Faust legend. Miss Swanwick, in the introduction to her translation of Goethe's Faust, says: "The Faust legend was a continuation of the Magus legend, which arose in ancient times from the deification of the powers of Nature. In the sixteenth century the Magus legend became associated with Dr. Faustus." Simon Magus, the hero of the Magus legend, is mentioned |