Into the details of the Witch-Sabbaths I have not entered; it is unnecessary. My object has been to show that in all likelihood there were such gatherings, that they took the place of assemblies of Pagan origin, which were analogous to the assemblies of the spiritual Pauline heretics in the early Church; that modern revivals are not derived from these, but are analogous exhibitions, and that all are alike manifestations of hysteria, superinduced by a love of the sensational, a vague credulity, and an absolute stagnation of the intellectual powers. We are in the age of compulsory education; in our Board Schools religious teaching is reduced to the thinnest gruel, absolutely tasteless, and wholly unnutritious. We are straining, perhaps over-straining, the mental faculties, and making no provision for the co-ordinate development of the spiritual powers in the soul. The result will be, not that we shall kill the spiritual faculty, but that we shall drive it in--and it will break forth inevitably in extraordinary and outrageous manifestations. It must do so--just as a check to the free action of the pores superinduces fever. We shall have a sporadic fever of wild mysticism bursting forth, in the place of healthy religion. The spiritual element in man will rebel against compression, will insist on not being ignored. We are now suffering from the nuisance of the Salvation Army. But the Salvation Army is a comparatively innocuous form of reaction, or is comparatively innocuous just at present. We do not know but that it may herald other and worse forms of spiritual excitement, or that it may not itself develop in an Antinomian direction. We have no guarantee. There is a law in these manifestations that is constant. They all begin in ecstatic raptures and with a high moral aim, and all inevitably fall into laxity if not license in morality. The moral sense becomes inevitably blunted. It ceases to speak and work when man takes his ecstatic thrills and visions--which are veritable hallucinations--as the guide of his conduct, in place of the still small voice of conscience, instructed by the written, revealed law. IX. Broadside Ballads. “I love a ballad in print, a’ life,” said Mopsa, in the “Winter’s Tale,” and the clown confessed to the same liking. “I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.” [Illustration: _Fig. 37._--BALLAD SINGER, FROM A BROADSIDE.]