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Updated: April 30, 2025
At length the impostures of the priest had triumphed over the blandishments of the woman; Porto Carrero had remained victorious; and the Queen had fled in shame and mortification, from the Court where she had once been supreme. In her retirement she was soon joined by him whose arts had destroyed her influence.
Among these professed gamblers, it often happens that some of them, in order to create what they term resources, imagine tricks and impostures scarcely credible. I shall relate an anecdote which I picked up in the course of my inquiries respecting the garning-houses in Paris.
For this a future age will perhaps excuse Ambrose the Archbishop of Milan, the impostures he practised, remembering that, face to face, he held Theodosius the Great to accountability for the massacre of seven thousand persons, whom, in a fit of vengeance, he had murdered in the circus of Thessalonica, A.D. 390, and inexorably compelled the imperial culprit, to whom he and all his party were under such obligations, to atone for his crime by such penance as may be exacted in this world, teaching his sovereign "that though he was of the Church and in the Church, he was not above the Church;" that brute force must give way to intellect, and that even the meanest human being has rights in the sight of God.
Some of these jugglers generally accompany the armies, when they take the field, feeding the commanders with promises of victory, making the camp the scene of their mummeries and impostures, and dealing in amulets, containing mystic words, written in characters, which none but the marabout who disposes of them can decipher.
Nigel had no doubt that the object of the passage was to enable the priests either to work on the minds of the prisoners by pretended miraculous appearances; or else, should they desire to murder one of their captives, to convey the body secretly away. He, indeed, knew that such arrangements were common throughout Europe, and that numberless impostures had thus been carried out.
They believed that the French people had been depraved by the slavery to which their kings had subjected them. Everything, they argued, which suggested the former rule of kings must be wiped out. A new France should be created, in which liberty, equality, and fraternity should take the place of the tyranny of princes, the insolence of nobles, and the impostures of the priests.
But Napoleon was an exception to this rule. He was tolerably well educated, and he possessed considerable critical powers in art, literature, and science. He penetrated through all shams and impostures. He was rarely deceived as to men or women. He could be eloquent and interesting in conversation. Some of his expressions pierced like lightning, and were exceedingly effective.
In dealing with facts there is nothing in his speech but a perversion of the truth; impostures abound in it of pure invention, palpable, as brazen as those of a charlatan in his booth; he does not even deign to disguise them with a shadow of probability; as to the Girondists, and as to Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine and his other adversaries, whoever they may be, old or new, any rope to hang them with suffices for him; any rough, knotted, badly-twisted cord he can lay his hands on, no matter what, provided it strangles, is good enough; there is no need of a finer one for confirmed conspirators; with the gossip of the club and an Inquisition catechism, he can frame his bill of indictment.
The heading of this chapter enumerates the principal kinds of supernatural humbugs. These, it must be remembered, are quite different from religious impostures.
To compare Zionism with the vagaries or impostures of false Messiahs of the Sabbathai Levi kind, presupposes great foolishness or great bad faith. Zionism is precisely characterized by the complete absence of any mystical element.
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