Not that he was a barbarian. He was an educated, cultivated man, accustomed to the luxuries and full of the suavities of civilized life. Civilization and religion are not synonymous. Hell itself has a stupendous civilization. Magistus was a Pharisee by profession: a ritualist, and a strict observer of feast-days and ordinances and ceremonies. That, however, was not the man, but only his outer garment—his cloak. Supposed by the world to be virtuous and honest, this wealthy and reputable Pharisee was spiritually a whited sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. He was a spiritualist, a sorcerer, a necromancer, a magician. He at first sought and became familiar with these people, with their studies and arts, from natural curiosity. It was very pleasant to call up his dead father and various dead friends, and converse with them. It was agreeable to know that they were all happy, and advancing in various degrees toward the infinite divine perfection. They showed him wonderful things. They performed miracles in his sight greater than those which the magicians of Egypt performed before Pharaoh. Then they told him that the Jewish Scriptures were not divinely inspired, but a medley of fables, passable poetry and childish philosophy. He had already suspected this; and he congratulated the spirits on possessing a critical genius so similar to his own. He finally acquired, from these supernatural instructors, a grand system of philosophy, revealing the divinity of nature and the laws of progress. Having become convinced that there are great and subtile powers emanating from the spiritual world, unknown to most men, he determined to avail himself of those powers for his own private ends. He became a secret pupil and disciple of magicians and wizards. He communicated with spirits and permitted them to take possession of him, soul and body, so that they spoke through his mouth and wrote through his hand and came at his call. He learned all the tricks and spells of legerdemain, the arts and formulas and incantations of magic, and the rites and ceremonies of the black art in its broadest sense. He obtained means of seeing objects at any distance, of producing hallucinations or optical illusions, of personating the dead, of finding hidden treasures, of reading men’s thoughts, of sowing enmity between friends, of discovering secrets, and a thousand other astounding and almost incredible things. The soul is not destroyed in a moment: it is the work of years. The evil spirits and demons with whom he was thus brought into contact, slowly poisoned the fountain-head of character; extinguished his reverence, his modesty, his respect for marriage; undermined his conscience; swept away all religious and even social and civil scruples; and fired and sustained all his evil propensities; so that, externally a faithful disciple of Moses, he was interiorly a devil, governed only by the love of self and the world.