The splendid topic of human Superstitions can be only just touched upon here. In this boundless field, strewn with all the blossoms of all philosophy, the human observer may wander for ever. He can never have done culling the evidence that it presents, or enjoying the promise which it yields. All that we can now do is just to suggest that as the superstitions of all nations are the embodiment of their idealized convictions, the state of religious sentiment may be learned from them almost without danger of mistake. No society is without its superstitions, any more than it is without its convictions and its imaginations. Even under the moderate form of religion, there is room for superstition; and the ascetic, which glories in having put away the superstitions of the licentious forms, has superstitions of its own.--The followers of an ascetic religion have more or less belief in judgments,--in retributive evils, arbitrarily inflicted. Among them may be gathered a harvest of tales of divine interference,--from the bee stinging the tip of the swearer's tongue to the sudden death of false witnesses. Among them do superstitions about times and seasons flourish, even to the forgetfulness that the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Some ascetics have faith in the lot,--like the Moravians in ordering marriage, or Wesley in opening his Bible to light upon texts. Others believe in warnings of evil; and most dread the commission of ritual fully as much as of moral sins. To play even a hymn tune on the piano on Sundays is an offence in the Highlands of Scotland; and to miss prayers is a matter of penance in a convent. The superstitions of the ascetic are scarcely fewer or more moderate than those of the licentious form of religion; the chief difference between the two lies in the spirit from which they emanate. The superstitions of the ascetic arise from the spirit of fear; those of the heathen arise perhaps equally from the spirit of love and the spirit of fear.