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This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion
sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history
the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty
self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the
higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like
theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful
sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence
of it, such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an
impious and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to
God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives concurred to
whet the edge of the priest's hostility. He professed to be the
proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and no
doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often injured by a
rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road to
fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.
Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its
appearance comparatively late in the history of religion.
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