HISTORY OF MAGIC.

scare us. "I am only afraid of those who fear the devil," said Saint Teresa Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic and reformer.. But we also declare that he does not make us laugh, and that we find the mockery of which he is so often the object to be very misplaced.

Whatever he may be, we wish to bring him before science.

The devil and science! — It seems that by bringing together two names so strangely disparate, the author of this book has already revealed his entire thought. To bring before the light the mystic personification of darkness, is this not to annihilate the phantom of falsehood before the truth? Is it not to dissipate in the daylight the formless nightmares of the night? This is what superficial readers will think, we do not doubt, and they will condemn us without hearing us. Poorly instructed Christians will believe that we come to undermine the fundamental dogma of their morality by denying hell, and others will ask what is the use of fighting errors that no longer deceive anyone; at least, that is what they imagine. It is therefore important to clearly show our goal and to solidly establish our principles. We say first to the Christians:

The author of this book is a Christian like you. His faith is that of a strongly and deeply convinced Catholic. He does not come to deny dogmas; he comes to fight impiety in its most dangerous forms: those of false belief and superstition. He comes to pull from the darkness the black successor of Arimanes Ahriman, the spirit of evil in Zoroastrianism, in order to display in broad daylight his gigantic impotence and his redoubtable misery. He comes to submit to the solutions of science the ancient problem of evil. He wants to uncrown the king of the

INTRODUCTION.

infernal regions and bow his forehead even under the foot of the cross! Is not Science, as Virgin and mother—the science of which Mary is the sweet and luminous image—predestined to also crush the head of the ancient serpent?

To the so-called philosophers the author will say: Why do you deny what you cannot understand? Is not the incredulity that asserts itself in the face of the unknown more rash and less consoling than faith? What, the terrifying figure of personified evil makes you smile? Do you then not hear the eternal sob of humanity, struggling and weeping, crushed by the monster's grip? Have you then never seen the atrocious laughter of the wicked man oppressing the just? Have you then never felt opening within yourselves those infernal depths that the genius of perversity digs at moments in every soul? Moral evil exists; it is a lamentable truth. It reigns in certain spirits; it is incarnated in certain men. It is therefore personified. Demons therefore exist, and the most wicked of these demons is Satan. This is all I ask you to admit, and it will be difficult for you not to grant it to me.

Let it be well understood, moreover, that science and faith only lend each other mutual support as long as their domains are inviolable and separate. What do we believe? That which we absolutely cannot know, even though we long for it with all our strength. The object of faith is for science only a necessary hypothesis, and one must never judge the things of science with the methods of faith, nor, conversely, the things of faith with the methods of science. The word original: "verbe" of faith is not scientifically discussable. "I believe because it is absurd,"