The Hillsborough Recorder

MAGIC.

No one can doubt, that the achievements of modern science have conferred on mortals, powers which the ancients hesitated to confer on their inferior gods. What in the dark ages was called magic is what we now perform.—The elements obey us. We ride upon the clouds. We weigh the orbs of heaven in the balance, and unravel the threads of light. We descend to the abysses of the ocean, and redeem the treasures it has swallowed. We call the lightning from Heaven; we impose a talismanic yoke on the destructive fire blast of the mines. We command, and fire impels our barks through the hostile but submissive surge. Our commonest houses are supplied with a light more wonderful, obedient and romantic, than the illuminated palaces of eastern enchanters, or the visionary cities in fairyland. A magician was scarcely permitted so much power by the creed of superstition. Individuals, therefore, like Bacon, Wilkinson, or others, who in darker ages anticipated many of these discoveries, or societies who retained them from the common people under the bond of secrecy, were in fact magicians, as far as the commonality could define the word. A machinery founded upon these secret powers over nature may thus be apparently magical, and yet strictly true.