[47] “Sorcery, in the beginning purely individual and fantastic,” says M. Réville, “gradually develops into sacerdotalism and by that change, having become a permanent public institution, sacerdotal sorcery becomes systematic, develops a ritual which becomes traditional, imposes upon those who aspire to the honour of conducting the conditions of initiation, proof of efficiency, a novitiate, receives privileges, defends them if they are attacked, endeavours to augment them. This is the history of all sacerdotal institutions, which are certainly descended from a capricious, fantastic, disorderly, practice of sorcery in previous ages.” [Sidenote: Tendency of priest to become a sacred person.] The externals of worship remain to-day, in special in the Catholic and Greek religions, a collection of traditional, inflexible formulæ, which could not be trusted to produce their effect if a word or a gesture in them were changed; certain ceremonies are really veritable traditional forms of incantation. Rites resemble the invisible bonds in which Faust held the Devil; but it is God himself in this case that is enchanted, charmed, and overpowered. At bottom the belief which makes the Chinese priest turn his praying machine, the belief which makes the devotee tell her beads, the belief which makes the priest thumb his breviary or say salaried masses for unknown peoples, which in the Midi makes rich people pay beggars to mumble prayers before their doors, all rest upon one and the same principle: they all rest on a faith in a power of the rite, of the traditional formula in and of itself, no matter who pronounces it. The efficacity of the interested prayers does not seem to depend solely on the legitimacy of what one demands but on the form employed in demanding them; and this form has been determined at bottom by experience; the majority of devotees perform minute experiments on the comparative virtue of individual prayers, masses, offerings, pilgrimages, miraculous waters, etc.; they amass the result of their observations and transmit them to their children. The invocation of certain privileged Madonnas, such as the Madonna at Lourdes, is even to-day a vestige of primitive sorcery. The priest inherits all these naïve experiments as to the conditions appropriate to induce a miracle, and he systematizes them. Priests being men picked for their capability in the function which was regarded as the most useful of all others for the preservation of society, necessarily came to constitute a really superior caste and to be personally in some sense the object of the cult which they administered. The perfect type of sacerdotal privilege is hereditary priesthood as it existed in ancient Judaism, as it still exists in India; every Brahman is born a priest and needs no special education. The thirty-seven great priests of Vishnu in Gujerat are