With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer
and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and
magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is
gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a
black art. It is not regarded as an encroachment, at once vain and
impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the
steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and influence
rise or fall with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period
the distinction between religion and superstition has emerged, we
find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and
enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of
the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the
conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving way
to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it
implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of
cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the
obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by
investigating the causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the
way for science.
Pages:
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279