Verily, then, to antiquity alone have we to look for the origin of all things. How well Hargrave Jennings expresses himself when speaking of Pyramids, and how true are his words when he asks: “Is it at all reasonable to conclude, at a period when knowledge was at the highest, and when the human powers were, in comparison with ours at the present time, prodigious, that all these indomitable, _scarcely believable_ physical effects—that such achievements as those of the Egyptians—were devoted to a mistake? that the myriads of the Nile were fools laboring in the dark, and that all the magic of their great men was forgery, and that we, in despising that which we call their superstition and wasted power, are alone the wise? No! there is much more in these old religions than probably—in the audacity of modern denial, in the confidence of these superficial-science times, and in the derision of these days without faith—is in the least degree supposed. We do not understand the old time.... Thus we see how classic practice and heathen teaching may be made to reconcile—how even the Gentile and the {36} Hebrew, the mythological and the Christian doctrine harmonize in the general faith founded on Magic. That Magic is indeed possible is the moral of this book.”[107] It is possible. Thirty years ago, when the first rappings of Rochester awakened slumbering attention to the reality of an invisible world; when the gentle shower of raps gradually became a torrent which overflowed the whole globe, spiritualists had to contend but against two potencies—theology and science. But the theosophists have, in addition to these, to meet the world at large and the spiritualists first of all.