I contend,
therefore, that people who go to see conjuring performances derive
no good from them, but that, on the contrary, they are apt to be impressed
with the idea that to practise deception is to show praiseworthy skill.
It is strange how many people pay money to others to deceive them.
More than ever before, people to-day actually enjoy being cheated.
If the tricks were clumsily devised and easily detected
there would be no attraction, but the cleverer and more puzzling the trick
the more eagerly people flock to see it.
Christian preachers and moralists could do well to take up this matter
and discourage people from frequenting the exhibitions of tricksters.
There are doubtless many laws in nature yet undiscovered, and a few persons
undoubtedly possess abnormal powers. This makes the cultivation
of the love of trickery the more dangerous. It prevents the truth
from being perceived. It enables charlatans to find dupes,
and causes the real magician to be applauded as a legerdemainist.
This is what the New Testament tells us happened in the case of Jesus Christ.
His miracles failed to convince because the people had for a long time
loved those who could deceive them cleverly.* The people said to him,
"Thou hast a devil," and others warned them after his death saying,
"That deceiver said while he was yet alive `After three days
I will rise again.'" When people are taught not only to marvel
at the marvelous but to be indifferent to its falsehoods
they lose the power of discrimination, and are apt to take
the true for the false, the real for the unreal.
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