CHAPTER XIII
Fascination
The Church condemns magic and must condemn it, because she has made it her own monopoly. ft is her place to use the occult forces employed by the ancient magi to deceive and subjugate the multitudes of their own day for the purpose. now, of the progressive enlightenment of men’s spirits and for setting their souls free through the priesthood and morality.
This she must do on pain of death, but we have already said that she is immortal and that, for her, apparent death is potentially a work of regeneration and transfiguration.
Among the powers sLe commands, which can he used either for good or for ill, the power of fascination must be counted as one of the chief.
By fascination is meant the ability to make peopie believe the impossible, to see the invisible and to touch he impalpable; in other words, to rake possession of the intellectual liberty of those whom one binds or looses at will.
Fascination is always the result of impressiveness.
When fascination is not achieved by falsehood, it is always brought about by some piece of itnpressive staging.
Take Moses when he was going to promulgate the Decalogue. He surrounded the most forbidding mountain in the desert with a barrier which might not be crossed on pain of death. At the sound of the trumpet, he ascended it to meet the Lord God face to face and, as evening fell, the whole mountain smoked amid a fearful display of thunder and lightning. The people trembled and fell on their faces; they could feel the earth shafce; it seemed to them that the crags leapt like rams and the hills skipped like flocks of sheep. Then, as soon as the volcano had subsided, when the thunders had ceased, and the wonder-worker belatedly returned, he found the nation in a state of rebellion, determined
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