I have led the reader through this analysis of the original words, to aid him toward some just conception of the associated ideas which cluster round the _magic arts_ of the Hebrew age. Their name and their arts are legion. Think of so many classes――professions――of men and women naturally shrewd, sharp, cunning; practicing upon the superstitions, the fears, the gullibility of the millions; gaining an almost unlimited control over them; working upon their imagination, haunting them with the dread of unknown powers, bringing up to them ghosts froth the invisible world, claiming to give auguries of the future, playing in every way that may be for their own selfish interests upon their fears and their hopes to extort their money or to make sport of their fears, or to gratify their own or others’ malice. Or go still deeper and see all this machinery subsidized by the devil to impress men with his supremacy, to extort their homage, or at least their fear of himself; and perhaps, most of all, to turn them utterly away from the true God and to displace him from his proper sphere as the supreme hope and joy and trust of mortals.――――It will always be an unsettled question――How much help in the line of superhuman knowledge and power does Satan give to his servants who work the infernal machinery of magic arts? But on the point of his interest and sympathy in these arts, there need not be the least question whatever. A system so near akin in spirit and influence to idolatry――which so thoroughly displaces God from the hopes and fears of men, and which seeks so successfully to instal these horrible superstitions in his place;――a system which perverts the powers of the world to come to subserve ungodliness and which practically rules out the Blessed God from the sphere of men’s homage, fears, and hopes;――this system has always been worked by wicked and never by good men――has always subserved all iniquity, but piety and morality never;――this has been a master stroke of Satan’s policy and one of the most palpable fields of his triumph through all the ages.――――Let it not surprise us that God’s law given through Moses denounced it unqualifiedly and made it punishable with death.