man is become as one of us." It becomes evident to him that the Hebrews, like their neighbors, worshiped "baalim" or the gods of the heathens. The "teraphim," the etymology of which is unknown, were little portable idols which seem to have been the Lares of the ancient Hebrews. David owned some (I Samuel XIX, 13-16), and the prophet Hosea, in the eighth century before Christ, seems still to have considered the "teraphim" as indispensable in worship (Hos. III, 4). These evidences of polytheism and fetichism in the people of Israel destroy, in the mind of the Martian, the claim of these people to have been faithful from their earliest origin to a spiritual monotheism. Rather does he find that they took the religions of other peoples with whom they came in contact.
The Old Testament contains numerous instances of the practice of magic. Moses and Aaron were magicians who rivalled Pharaoh's magicians (Ex. VII, 11-20); and Balaam was a magician who pronounced incantations against Israel and afterwards passed over to the service of Jehovah. Jacob resorted to a kind of sympathetic magic to procure the birth of a speckled sheep (Gen. XXX, 39). "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," is written in Exodus XXII, 18, and this phrase offered an affirmation of the reality of witchcraft during the period of the Witchcraft Delusion. The Martian notes that the sentence, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," has caused more suffering, torture, and death than probably any other sentence ever framed. His mind revolts at the stupidity and the slavish adherence to so-called authority of the human mind, which is manifested in this example of what occurred in the period of the Witchcraft Delusion, when the words of an ignorant and barbaric Hebrew were taken by Christian followers to be the words of a god. And yet our
