When the gods have withdrawn from human fellowship, and no longer choose their brides from the dwellers upon earth, or even vouchsafe to appear among them in various forms for temporary help or promise of blessing, the communications from heaven do not cease altogether. The Vedic poet might challenge the existence of Indra, the fool might say in his heart, "There is no God"; but the Powers above never left themselves without a witness. The negro going out of his hut one morning strikes his foot against a peculiarly shaped stone. "Art thou there?" he inquires, and recognises the presence of a guardian and {178} helper. The Samoan watches the behaviour of a spinning cocoa-nut, or the flight of a bird to right or left. The Central Asiatic notes the cracks on a tortoise's shell, much as a modern palmist traces the lines in a human hand. The liver is selected as the special seat of the prophetic faculty, and Babylonian and Etruscan developed a common diagnosis of its marks. The Celt divined by the water of wells, or the smoke and flames of ascending fires, and slew his prisoners that the secrets of destiny might be discovered in their entrails. China and Rome made divination the basis of elaborate state systems. Rome produced a literature of Augury, with books of regulations and minutes of procedure, while Plato commended it as "the art of fellowship between gods and men," and the philosophy of the Stoics justified it on the ground of a providential harmony between nature and man, so that divine guidance was vouchsafed to human need. Did not clouds and stars move by Heaven's great ordinance? The lot took the responsibility of decision out of the hands of man, and vested it in the presiding deity. There is always a mystery in chance, which could be interpreted as the will of God. The oath implied that the heavenly Powers could be at any moment summoned to attest man's veracity; and the vow must be fulfilled, though it might cost Jephthah the sacrifice of his daughter. Perjury and broken vows were early recognised {179} among the gravest of crimes. The ordeal was in like manner the inquisition of a divine judge. When the Adum draught was administered to an accused Ashanti upon the Gold Coast, the god condescended to enter with it; he looked around for the signs of guilt, and if he found none he returned with the nauseous mixture to the light of day. It was a procedure analogous to the ancient rite embedded in the Levitical Law as the test of a wife's faithlessness (_cp._ Num. v. 11 _sqq._).