2. Popular superstitions have caused a great waste of human life. Cast your eye over the page of history. You there notice an account of the trial by ordeal. The accused person was required either to hold red-hot iron balls in his naked hands, or to walk over red-hot plates of iron with bare feet. If he escaped unburned, he was considered innocent; but if he was scorched, sentence of death was pronounced. Or he was compelled either to thrust his arm into a caldron of boiling water, or be thrown into a deep pond. If he was either unscalded or drowned, his innocence was proved; but if he was scalded or could swim, the sentence of condemnation was passed. In neither case could life be saved, except by the interposition of a miracle; and this was not expected on such occasions. And through this superstition, thousands perished in the most cruel and unrighteous manner. A distinguished writer computes that more than one hundred thousand persons, of all ages, have suffered death for witchcraft alone. Only think! one hundred thousand persons murdered for a crime of which no human person was ever guilty! There are others who bring upon themselves sickness, and even death, by their belief in signs, dreams, and forewarnings. But as the gospel sheds abroad its divine light, these things are found to recede, and to give place to more rational views of divine wisdom and goodness, in the control and arrangement of events having a relation to our being and happiness. The author of the Family Encyclopædia says, that "the superstitious notions of ghosts, spirits, &c., are rapidly declining; and notwithstanding all the solemn tales which have been propagated, there is no reason to believe that any real spirits or celestial agents have held intercourse with man since the establishment of Christianity;" and that "the history of modern miracles, appearances of the dead, &c., will be always found, when thoroughly examined, merely the phantoms of a disordered imagination."