require correct living and clear thinking on the part of the earthly psychic. In the first place, the witch (poor woman) lived in days when the physiological relations of husband and wife occupied a far lower place in popular estimation than it did in the days of Mary, and moreover, in the Orient, Mary's home, the relation of husband and wife had then and still has, a holiness on its physiological side which is foreign to European or American habits of thought. When the peculiar psychical experiences of the witch set in, therefore, she naturally jumped to the conclusion that, first they were sinful; second, that, being sinful, they were the work of Satan. These assumptions were a departure from clear, unprejudiced thinking, and from that moment began her diabolical illusions, and she saw monsters, hobnobbed with imps, was lashed by scorpions, etc., etc., to the full extent of her willingness to receive these illusions as objective realities. The poor creatures indeed, had not our advantages in the perusal of records of hypnotism and of the Society for Psychical Research, and would have been sadly puzzled to draw the line between subjective illusion and objective materialization. Nevertheless, her angel lover was with her when she thought him the Devil. He comforted her in her poverty and loneliness (many of these witches, remember, were old women, whose lives had been the bare, dreary, lives of the terrible poor) and he promised her such influence among her neighbors as she longed for most. This was an ordeal, had she but known it, which, if passed successfully, would have brought her a higher and sweeter pleasure. Some there were, here and there, who seem to have chosen the better part, and to have become "white witches," capable of clairvoyance, of healing human beings and cattle of strange diseases, forecasting the future and the like. But usually, these poor old women had been so embittered against selfish or heedless neighbors, that the influence they longed for most was to pay back their wrongs (real or supposed) with interest. Here again, they broke the occult law which calls for correct living on the part of the psychic, and trod the downward path of hatred and diabolism. In many cases, no doubt the psychical experiences
