The History of Magic

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to make him by continued wanderings a stranger in the earth which should offer him no resting place but the grave. In the nation chosen through Abraham, the true unity of religion, faith, and the true worship, were transmitted and retained, amid the surrounding disbelief of the other pagan nations. The true revelation of a reconciliation with God, and the reattainment of the original power of representing the Almighty, first in laws and mysteries, and lastly by direct communication from the lips to the heart, took place by this selection of the seed of Shem through Abraham, through the children of Jacob, through the prophets; and lastly, in the radiance of the living word through our Lord Jesus Christ. If the Shemitic races had already lost the inner communion with nature, and the susceptibility to all higher spiritual impressions, how much more must this have been the case among the descendants of Japhet. In accordance with their naturally impulsive feelings and unstable character, they always made, during their extension over the earth, nature and its appearances, rather than the Divine Spirit, the object of their strivings; their instinct explored every nook and hidden valley of the many countries lying beyond the rivers and mountains; but they had lost the recollection ol the Almighty, or at most retained but a faint reflection of the divine power which, like their mind, was deeply imbued with the material; for the divine light was no longer able to reflect itself in the dimmed and confused surface of theu- inner being. However, these children of Japhet did not all sink into the darkness of a perfectly spiritless world of matter; some of them, as the Greeks, the Germans, carried with them the idea of God, and the presentiment of a connection with a higher and more spiritua...