Religion and magic were long bound up with one another. It is useless to ask which came first, for they are not mutually exclusive in the beginning. Only as an ethical monotheism, with a high respect for the personality and power of the deity worshiped, develops, is the magical element rejected. There are few religions, even to-day, which do not contain magical elements, and the farther back in time we go, the more conspicuous is the presence of incantations and ritual acts imputed to have a mysterious efficacy. Man had sore need of help, and so he adopted all the means which accident, fancy and ignorance suggested. If certain acts gave him the _mana_ of his god or brought pressure to bear upon a supernatural agent, so much the better. Much of early liturgy is a mingling of spell and prayer, and it is strictly true that much of Christian liturgy bears traces of this origin. The following example shows this intertwining of higher and lower elements: In the blessing of the baptismal water on the eve of Epiphany, a custom prevalent in the earlier Church {54} of Rome, the priest, while praying to God to sanctify the water, dipped a crucifix thrice into it, recalling in his prayer the miracle described in Exodus, the sweetening of the bitter water with wood; then followed antiphonal singing describing Christ's baptism in Jordan, which sanctified the water. "We appear to have here," writes L. D. Farnell, "a combination of the great typical forms of the immemorial religious energy, prayer pure and simple, the potent use of the spiritually charged object, the fetish (in this case the crucifix), and an intoned or chanted narrative which has the spell-value of suggestion." It has been suggested by certain investigators that magic is nearer science than religion. It is the attempt of man to compel things to do what he desires. In religion, on the other hand, man proclaims his helplessness and his utter dependence upon spiritual powers. There can be little doubt that this difference exists and comes more and more to the front. But it is not until religion evolves into spiritual prayer and communion and away from ritual processes that the separation takes place. Few events are more interesting than the gradual rejection of magic by religion. But does not this rejection involve a similar rejection of science? Here, again, we meet the inevitable compromise. White magic is distinguished from black magic. We shall have more to say of this relationship later. Only after countless centuries of mistake did the intellect of man discover the actual relations in nature in such a way as to be able to use them with certainty. Subjective associations were then replaced by tested causal connections. Faith in mere imitative acts was {55} lost, and it was finally realized that patient research was a pre-condition of the control of man's environment. Time, alone, could show what was possible and what was impossible.