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The same line of argument applies to all the compliances of Christ with the Jewish prejudices (partly imported from the Euphrates) as to demonology, witchcraft, etc. By the way, in this last word, ‘witchcraft,’ and the too memorable histories connected with it, lies a perfect mine of bibliolatrous madness. As it illustrates the folly and the wickedness of the biliolaters, let us pause upon it.

The word witch, these bibliolaters take it for granted, must mean exactly what the original Hebrew means, or the Greek word chosen by the LXX.; so much, and neither more nor less. That is, from total ignorance of the machinery by which language moves, they fancy that every idea and word which exists, or has existed, for any nation, ancient or modern, must have a direct interchangeable equivalent in all other languages; and that, if the dictionaries do not show it, that must be because the dictionaries are bad. Will these worthy people have the goodness, then, to translate coquette into Hebrew, and post-office into Greek? The fact is, that all languages, and in the ratio of their development, offer ideas absolutely separate and exclusive to themselves. In the highly cultured languages of England, France, and Germany, are words, by thousands, which are strictly untranslatable. They may be approached, but cannot be reflected as from a mirror. To take an image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap; and this arises from the varying modes in which different nations combine ideas. The French word shall combine the elements, l, m, n, o–the nearest English word, perhaps, m, n, o, p. For instance, in all words applied to the nuances of manners, and generally to social differences, how prodigious is the wealth of the French language! How merely untranslatable for all Europe! I suppose, my bibliolater, you have not yet finished your Hebrew or Samaritan translation of coquette. Well, you shall be excused from that, if you will only translate it into English. You cannot: you are obliged to keep the French word; and yet you take for granted, without inquiry, that in the word ‘witchcraft,’ and in the word ‘witch,’ applied to the sorceress of Endor, our authorized English Bible of King James’s day must be correct. And your wicked bibliolatrous ancestors proceeded on that idea throughout Christendom to murder harmless, friendless, and oftentimes crazy old women. Meantime the witch of Endor in no respect resembled our modern domestic witch.[Footnote: ‘The domestic witch.’–It is the common notion that the superstition of the evil eye, so widely diffused in the Southern lands, and in some, not a slumbering, but a fiercely operative superstition, is unknown in England and other Northern latitudes. On the contrary, to my thinking, the regular old vulgar witch of England and Scotland was but an impersonatrix of the very same superstition. Virgil expresses this mode of sorcery to the letter, when his shepherd says–

‘Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos?’

Precisely in that way it was that the British witch operated. She, by her eye, blighted the natural powers of growth and fertility. By the way, I ought to mention, as a case parallel to that of the Bible’s recognising witchcraft, and of enlightened nations continuing to punish it, that St. Paul himself, in an equal degree, recognises the evil eye; that is, he uses the idea, (though certainly not meaning to accredit such an idea,) as one that briefly and energetically conveyed his meaning to those whom he was addressing. ‘Oh, foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?’ That is, literally, who has fascinated your senses by the evil eye? For the Greek is, tis umas ebaskanen? Now the word ebaskanen is a past tense of the verb baskaino, which was the technical term for the action of the evil eye. Without having written a treatise on the Æolic digamma, probably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many languages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands of words, as the Italian tavola, from the Latin tabula. Under that little process it was that the Greek baskaino transmigrated into the Latin fascino; so that St. Paul’s word, in speaking to the Galatians, is the very game word as Virgil’s, in speaking of the shepherd’s flock as charmed by the evil eye.] There was as much difference as between a Roman Proconsul, surrounded with eagle-bearers, and a commercial Consul’s clerk with a pen behind his ear. Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an Erichtho. (See the Pharsalia.) She was an Evocatrix, or female necromancer, evoking phantoms that stood in some unknown relation to dead men; and then by some artifice (it has been supposed) of ventriloquism,[Footnote: I am not referring to German infidels. Very pious commentators have connected her with the engastrimuthoi (Î�Î�Î�Î�στρÎ�Î��…Î�Î�Î�) or ventriloquists.] causing these phantoms to deliver oracular answers upon great political questions. Oh, that one had lived in the times of those New-England wretches that desolated whole districts and terrified vast provinces by their judicial murders of witches, under plea of a bibliolatrous warrant; until at last the fiery furnace, which they had heated for women and children, shot forth flames that, like those of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, seizing upon his very agents, began to reach some of the murderous judges and denouncers!