The belief in magic is not general in our age of the world. It has gradually retired before the march of reason and the light of scientific truth. That all nature, organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, is subject to a universal law of cause and effect, is now a truism to every educated person. Science has forever destroyed the curative influence of phrases. Reason sternly excludes verbal formulæ from the realm of physical causation. That any mere words may be used against disease or injury is now denied by enlightened opinion the world over. In medicine, therefore, Exorcism is a thing of the past. One aspect of the superstition still remains, as an obstacle to the progress of humanity; the possibility of legislating morality into men. Law-givers still cling to the power of “exorcism” by statute. Their blind creed is: “beatification and education by law.” “To them, laws are the cows, whose teats mankind should suck. To them, men are as dough, which their wisdom would knead.” This adoration of the law and legislators was systematically inculcated by the 18th century publicists: Montesquieu, Robespierre, Rousseau, and St. Just. They seem to teach that “the law cannot come out of us, but must be poured into us.” But, as Erlanger has said with truth, he who undertakes to give institutions to a people must feel within himself the capacity to change human nature, to metamorphose every man, to transmute the constitution of each individual, to strengthen them; in one word, “he must take from mankind their own powers, and impart to them a foreign power.”