The Age - Saturday, April 13, 1895

Many people, of course, regard all these things as mere superstitions; and Oscar Wilde, of infamous notoriety, had a good word to say for superstitions, which he called "the color element of thought and imagination," pleading, "don't make us too offensively sane." But others, more particularly the spiritualists, will find in all these worldwide phenomena evidences of the same occult influences which they say have existed in all climes and times. Believers in Scripture, as we have said, cannot laugh witches away, nor make light of the "black art" of the sorcerer, seeing that they are both denounced as very real things, from the Book of Exodus to that of Revelation. There may be occult powers everywhere. Indeed, we must believe there are such, though they have as yet escaped the man of science. The poet was certainly right when he exclaimed —

Oh, father, what a hell of witchcraft lies
In the small orb of one particular tear.

The lover finds in a glance a witchcraft that can metamorphose him. But what ever seeming evidence may have caused that Irish husband to roast his wife to death, and that Irish father to assist in the horrible act of cremation, it comes to us as an intolerable anachronism on the breezy science of the latter days of the nineteenth century.