While the prohibitions uttered by the papacy had undoubtedly much to do in influencing monarchs to abolish the ordeal, there were other causes of scarcely less weight working to the same end. The revival of the Roman law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the introduction of torture as an unfailing expedient in doubtful cases did much to influence the secular tribunals against all ordeals. So, also, a powerful assistant must be recognized in the rise of the communes, whose sturdy common sense not infrequently rejected its absurdity. These influences, however, have been discussed at some length in the previous essay, and it is scarce worth while to repeat what has there been said, except to add that, as a recognized legal procedure, the ordeal succumbed with a less prolonged struggle than the single combat. Yet no definite period can be assigned to the disappearance in any country of the appeals to Heaven handed down from our ancestors in the illimitable past. We have seen above how certain forms of the ordeal, such as bier-right and the trial by cold water, have lingered virtually to our own times, though long since displaced from the statute-book; and we should err if we deemed the prohibition of the system by lawgivers to be either the effect or the cause of a change in the constitution of the human mind. The mysterious attraction of the unknown, the striving for the unattainable, the yearning to connect our mortal nature with some supernal power—all these mixed motives assist in maintaining the superstitions which we have thus passed in review. Even though the external manifestations may have been swept away, the potent agencies which vivified them have remained, not perhaps less active because they work more secretly. One generation of follies after another, strangely affiliated, waits on the successive descendants of man, and perpetuates in another shape the superstition which seemed to be eradicated. In its most vulgar and abhorrent form, we recognize it in the fearful epidemic of sorcery and witchcraft which afflicted the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; sublimed to the verge of heaven, we see it reappear in the seraphic theories of Quietism; descending again towards earth, it stimulates the mad vagaries of the Convulsionnaires. In a different guise, it leads the refined scepticism of the eighteenth century to a belief in the supernatural powers of the divining rod, which could not only trace out hidden springs and deep-buried mines, but could also discover crime, and follow the malefactor through all the doublings of his cunning flight.[1375] Even at the present day, as various references in the preceding pages sufficiently attest, there is a lurking undercurrent of superstition which occasionally rises into view and shows that we are not yet exempt from the weakness of the past. Each age has its own sins and follies to answer for—happiest that which best succeeds in hiding them, for it can scarce do more.