As Pastor, He was merciful; as Judge, severe and just. His laws against witchcraft and Black Magic were of the most stringent kind. He used the means which every other sovereign of Europe also used. “East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia—” the most observant of modern English writers says. Men who have lived in the Far East, where Christian influence is very feeble, will recognize the singular correctness of Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s theory. Men, also, who at first hand have studied modern recrudescences of devil-worship, modern flirtations with kakodaimoniacal agencies, the Luciferianism of modern France, will not mutter with patronizing superiority of superstitions and old wives’ fables; but perfectly well will know that hideous abnormity with which the Pope’s Holiness had to deal. Only the wilfully ignorant deny the actuality of diabolic manifestations, called witchcraft and Black Magic in the vulgar tongue. The ostrich who buries her head in sand is like to these. By the side of high civilization there always runs the impulse to savagery, the weird and radical decadence which wanders on dark paths. Hellas and Rome pried into the mysteries of Isis; Christendom entertains Turlupins, Rosicrucians, Indian gumnosophists, and Mahatmas; the Borgian Era played with the Roaring Lion; the Victorian Era with Sathanas and his sorrows. “Perhaps”, “after all”, “audi alteram partem”,—hesitation, compromise, want of defined principle, lack of courageous singleness of mind,—amounting to Emasculation—is the mental note of the Twentieth Century. The Fifteenth had not a tithe of the knowledge now possessed: but it was awfully convinced, strong, and decisive, within its limitations. Then, there was no place for the palterer—except against the wall.