The Churches and Modern Thought An inquiry into the...

“Wherever sympathetic magic occurs,” says Dr. Frazer, “in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency”48 (the italics are mine). “The magician supplicates no higher power; he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being; he abases himself before no awful deity.”49 “I have,” says Dr. Frazer,50 “come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognising a fundamental distinction, and even opposition, of principle between magic and religion.” This opinion must be shared by every unbiassed mind, and it is curious, and not without importance, to observe, with Dr. Frazer, that the “fundamental conception” of sympathetic magic “is identical with that of modern science.”51 “Underlying the whole system is a faith—implicit, but real and firm—in the order and uniformity of nature.”52

The belief in the efficacy of magic, it should be remembered, is exceedingly widespread, even at the present time. According to Mr. Haddon53 (citing Dr. Jevons), “four-fifths of mankind, probably, believe in sympathetic magic.” Dr. Frazer, too, reminds us that among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world. “If the test of truth,” exclaims Dr. Frazer, “lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, ‘Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,’ as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility.”54

Not only is there an opposition of principle between magic and religion, not only is belief in the former a universal faith, a truly catholic creed, but it is now generally recognised by ethnologists that “in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has [as ‘has been plainly suggested, if not definitely formulated, by Professor H. Oldenberg in his able book, Die Religion des Veda’] probably everywhere preceded religion.”55

The popular notion that the religious instinct is universal is perhaps natural enough, but it is not borne out by these significant facts and conclusions. Indeed, it would be far more correct to say that an instinct, the very antithesis of what the Church would mean by the religious instinct, was at one time, and even now is, well-nigh universal.