the same results, and that they cannot all have been impostors or deluded victims, there remains enough in these well-established phenomena to ascribe them to a mysterious, magic power. (_Compendio della vita, etc. di G. Balsamo_, Roma, 1791.) It is in fact quite evident that the unfortunate juggler possessed in a very rare degree a power akin to that practised by a Mesmer, a Home, and other men of that class, without having the sense to understand its true nature or the ambition to employ it for other than the lowest selfish purposes. Trials of magicians, who have conjured up the dead and compelled them to reveal the future, are still taking place every now and then; in the year 1850 not less than four men, together with their associates, were accused of this crime in enlightened Germany, and the proceedings in one case, which occurred in Munich, created no small sensation. Black magic, therefore, must also be looked upon as by no means a mere illusion, much less as the work of evil spirits. The results it obtains at times are the work of man himself, and exist only within his own conscience. But if man can produce such marvelous effects, which lie apparently beyond the range of the material world, how much more must the Creator and Preserver of all things be able to call forth events which transcend--to our mind--the limits of the tangible world. Such occurrences, when they have a higher moral or religious purpose in view, we call Miracles, and they remain incomprehensible for all whose knowledge is confined to the physical world. Above the laws of nature there rules the Divine Will, which can do what Nature cannot do, and which we can only begin to understand when we bear in mind the fact that by the side of the visible order of the world or above it, there exist spiritual laws as well as spiritual beings. In a miracle, powers are rendered active which ordinarily remain inactive, but which exist none the less permanently in the world. Hence all great thinkers have readily admitted the existence of miracles: a Locke and a Leibnitz as well as, more recently, a Stahl and a Schopenhauer. Locke, in his "Discourse of Miracles," goes so far as to call them the very credentials of a messenger sent from God, and asserts that Moses and Christ have alike authenticated the truth and the divine character of their revelations by miracles. Even their possible continuance is believed in by those who hope that men will ever continue among us who "have tasted the good word of God and _the powers of the world to come_." (Hebrews vi. 5.) III. DREAMS. "To sleep--perchance to dream." --HAMLET.