Acts 7:10

10. From the least to the greatest Both old and young, pauper and magistrate, freely credited the super-naturalism of Simon. It was not the low and ignorant alone, but ladies of high rank, philosophers, generals, and emperors, that listened to magicians, fortune-tellers, and necromancers. Pompey, Crassus, and Cesar consulted Oriental astrologers; Brutus beheld an apparition summoning him to the fatal Philippi; and Cesar was warned by the soothsayers to “beware the ides of March.” Tiberius, at Capreae, “had a flock of Chaldeans around him.” Tacitus styles them “a class of men faithless to the powerful, fallacious to those hoping from them; which will ever be legally prohibited in the State, yet always retained.” In an age when old religions are dying out, the empty hearts of men are hungry for something beyond dead nature. Vacate men’s spirits of a true religion, and they will hanker after the vilest superstitions. There are at the present day so-called philosophers, who tell us that the age of faith is passing away, and the higher age of reason, the glorious millennium of Atheism, is coming on, when men will be far too wise to believe in God. But such an age would be rife with demon-worship and base paganism. We see in the sorceries of Simon something identical with the sorcery of the Old Testament, (and with the execrable pseudo-spiritualism of the present day,) something rather basely below nature: sub-natural rather than super-natural; where the depths of vice may perhaps be so fathomed as to reach clown to the infernal.

The great power The true reading is, This man is the power of God, which is called great. It refers, doubtless, to the masculine or greater power of nature in distinction from the feminine, of which Simon professed to be the incarnation.

It, of course, became the ascended Head of the Church, (see note on Acts 1:1,) the Lord Jesus, to overcome these spurious miracles by the genuine, and the false doctrines by the divinely true.