Superstition is “the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes”. The first commandment proscribes it as what “in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion”, where irreligion is the vice “contrary by defect”. It can reach the worship of the true God, as when one attributes “an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary”. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs “to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand” is to fall into it. It also expresses itself in “various forms of divination, magic, sorcery and spiritism”.
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