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Rh nineteenth century. Many writers point out that, when an old national religion decays, a large number of what they call "superstitions" appear. We think of the analogy of some decaying forest, where, as the old trees die, the spirit of the earth is incarnated in a hundred weird parasitic growths. So it was, these writers say, in the old Roman Empire. So it was again in Europe when the powerful Rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century had greatly impaired the vitality of the old religion. It sounds plausible, but it is little more than a figure of speech. It is the decay of ecclesiastical authority not of faith, which accounts mainly for the new developments. There were Spiritualists and occultists all through the Middle Ages; but they were promptly drowned as witches or burned as heretics. The fate of the few prevented the many from indulging this tendency, though it was always there. By the end of the eighteenth century the weapons had, in most countries, been torn from the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities, and the new freedom was exemplified in many curious ways.

Swedenborgianism was one of these new developments, and, as far as its small influence went, it helped to prepare the way for Spiritualism. But Swedenborgians were few and little noticed. They merely survived obscurely from decade to decade; the sudden and phenomenal development of Spiritualism about the middle of the nineteenth century is a totally different matter. It is absurd, from the historical point of view, to say more than that the