Arius the Libyan: A Romance of the Primitive Church

ARIUS
THE LIBYAN

A ROMANCE
OF THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH

BY
NATHAN CHAPMAN KOUNS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1914

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER

[Locus in Quo]
[To Us a Child is Born: to Us a Son is Given]
[How Men lived in the Kingdom of Heaven]
[Fine Training for a Christian Man]
[A Pagan Hermit, Old and Gray]
[Flotson of the Middle Sea]
[Theckla finds One God and heareth of Another]
[Who is Hapi?]
[The Democracy of Faith]
[Faith and Philosophy]
["For the Work's Sake"]
[The One Thing Needful]
[The Net Result of Law]
[The Blind Receive their Sight]
[Love and Parting]
[Before the Temple of Serapis]
[Crucified unto the World]

BOOK II.

["His Most Catholic Majesty"]
[A Naval Question]
[The Politics of Religion]
[The Prophecy of Gaius]
[A Born Ecclesiastic]
[The One Great Battle of Christendom!]
[The Subversion of the Primitive Church]
[The Abdication of Constantine]
["I have no Superior but Christ"]
[The Communion of the Saints]
[One Jot that passed from the Law]
[An Imperial Repentance]
[Well done, Good and Faithful Servant]

ARIUS THE LIBYAN.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

LOCUS IN QUO.

A long time ago, Etearchus, King of Axus, in Crete, married a second wife (as many better men have also done), and she persuaded him to get rid of Phronime, the pretty daughter of his former spouse. Thereupon Etearchus agreed with a merchant of Thera that he would take Phronime away in his ship and let her down into the sea. The merchant, true to the letter of his bargain, did let her down into the sea, but true also to that natural tenderness toward a pretty woman which inspires the breast of every man who is fit for anything in this world, he quickly drew her up again by a rope which he had fastened around her lissome waist for that purpose, and conveyed her safely enough to Thera.

There Phronime met another man, Polymnestus by name, a descendant of the ancient Minyæ, who also had a keen eye for feminine beauty, and him she married. By this Polymnestus our Phronime gave birth to a man-child, who grew up to be a terrible stammerer, and was therefore called Battus.

And afterward, when Grinus, the Theran king, made a pilgrimage to the oracle of Delphi to see whether the oracle would tell him some remedy for a fearful drought which then afflicted all the land of Thera, Battus the Stammerer went along with him to see whether the same sacred oracle would tell him some remedy by which to cure himself of stuttering. To both of these suppliants the oracle made the same answer, and this answer was as follows: "FOUND A CITY IN LIBYA!" But they did not know where Libya was, and were, therefore, very low-spirited about finding any cure for the drought and for the stammering; until it chanced that upon their homeward voyage they fell in with an ancient fisherman, Corobius by name, who had once been driven by storms upon the African coast, and he undertook to pilot them to Libya.

And afterward, it was about 630 B.C., Battus the Stutterer went with a colony to Libya, and founded there the city of Cyrene, almost ten miles from the Mediterranean, nearly two thousand feet above the level of the sea, with the grand Barcan mountains rising between it and the great desert of the same name. From this colony afterward sprang (Pentapolis, the Grecian five-cities) Cyrene, Bernice, Arsinoë, Barca, and Apollonia.

Thus far testifieth Herodotus, the father of history, who, if not always entirely trustworthy, is certainly no greater liar than the rest of the tribe.

Battus became king of all Cyrenaica, and his descendants, by the name of Battidæ, did rule that land, and maintain the prosperity of Cyrene through eight generations, until the Ptolemies of Egypt conquered the country, and under their patronage Apollonia, the seaport, became the chief city.

It would be a great error to suppose that because Cyrene was on the northern coast of Africa, and near the vast and arid Barcan Desert, it was therefore an unpleasant seat. On the contrary, it may well be doubted whether a more delightful locality can be found on earth. All Pentapolis is remarkably healthful and pleasant, especially Cyrene and its vicinity. The lofty mountain-range slopes gently away to the very sands of earth's middle sea, the waters of which temper the heat of the climate, while the high mountains lying farther inland ward off the hot blasts of the desert. In Cyrene, and between the city and the sea, a luxuriant soil produces almost every fruit, flower, and grain known to both tropical and temperate latitudes. The grand fountain of Apollo, which the Arabs of our age call 'Ain Sahât, gushed up in the very midst of it. The mean temperature is 85° Fahr., and the variations thereof are gradual and insignificant.

In the year 26 B.C., Apion, the last lineal descendant of the Egyptian Ptolemies, bequeathed the city to the Romans.

Cyrene, so happily situated, became noted, not only for its prosperity and salubriousness, but for the intellectual life and activity of its inhabitants. It long possessed a famous medical school; it gave to fame Callimachus, the poet; Carneades, the founder of the new academy at Athens; Aristippus, the disciple of Socrates; Eratosthenes, the Polyhistor; and Synesius, one of the most elegant of ancient Christian writers.

Not far from beautiful and prosperous Cyrene, on one of those gentle declivities which were washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, there was, in A.D. 265, a comfortable stone farm-house, pleasantly located in the midst of a considerable tract of cultivated lands. The farm faced a small bay and the limitless sea northwardly; southwardly the high range of the Barcan mountains rolled grandly away, their nearer slopes inclosing the farm between the highlands and the bay, and imparting to the beautiful place a most attractive sense of quiet and seclusion from the busy world. The house was one story high, containing seven rooms, and the ground plan of it was exactly the outline of a cross, there being four rooms and a portico in the length thereof, and three in its greatest width.

At this house, in the last-named year, was born a man-child, whose fate it was to become one of the grandest, purest, least understood, and most systematically misrepresented characters in human history--Arius the Libyan, the Heretic--whose fortunes, good and evil, whose experiences, heterodox or orthodox, shall be followed in these pages with genuine love and admiration, with profoundest pity also, and yet with a sincere desire to deal justly with his grand and beautiful memory, seeking to "nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice."

CHAPTER II.

TO US A CHILD IS BORN: TO US A SON IS GIVEN.

The family resident at the Libyan farm-house consisted of only the swarthy Egyptian Ammonius; his young wife Arete, who, although an Egyptian, had somehow acquired a purely Greek name, a fact which indicated vast influence that the great Grecian city of Alexandria had long exerted over Egypt; and an old female domestic that had belonged to Arete's mother during even her girlhood, and was called Thopt, the abbreviation of some ancient Coptic name, the letters of which still served to point out the fact that in her infancy she had been dedicated to the service of some one of the gods of the Nile.

The tropical sun was just rising along the Libyan coasts, when old Thopt came into the apartment in which sat Ammonius awaiting news of his wife, bearing in her arms a creature that was swaddled up in such innumerable bandages that it looked like a new and diminutive mummy, and, presenting this pygmy to the father, the old woman said: "It is a man-child, and a fine one! But he hath a forehead like a ram."

And Ammonius carefully but awkwardly took the parcel into his own hands, and looked upon it with curious emotion, whereupon the manikin began to cry so suddenly and vigorously that Ammonius would have let it drop upon the floor if old Thopt had not seized it just as the lapse began.

"How fareth the little man's mother?" said he, "and may I not go in to see her immediately?"

"She rallieth from her trial wonderfully," answered old Thopt, "and even now inquireth after thee."

And the great, rough, swarthy man went into his wife's room, and, bending over her, he kissed her with exceeding tenderness: "May the Lord help thee, mother," he said, "for thou art mother now, and doubly dear to me!"

"Bless thee, husband!" said Arete; "and remember that thou hast promised me that, if the babe should prove to be a boy, thou wouldst have him educated for the ministry of Christ. May the Lord raise him up for his own glory!"

"Amen!" replied Ammonius, fervently. "I did so promise thee, Arete, and will so do if the Lord will. Already our pleasant farm is so famous for its excellent cattle, that whereas I did call the house Baucalis because, when the wind bloweth from the east, the water runneth through the narrow entrance into the little bay, with a murmur like the gurgling of wine from a bottle, the neighbors call the place Boucalis because they say that no land in all Cyrenaica produceth more or better cattle. So, little mother, thou need not fear but that with the cattle and with shipments of corn to Alexandria, whence the merchants transport it unto Puteoli and Rome far across the sea, we shall be able to give thy boy all proper training to become a presbyter, or even a bishop, if he liveth and showeth a godly disposition."

"And thou wilt never let the love of gain, nor of worldly honors, grow upon thee until thou shalt repent thee of this purpose, and so determine that it would be better for the boy to betake himself to business affairs and acquire wealth rather than to serve God wholly?"

"Nay, verily," cried Ammonius; "for the matter lieth nearer to my heart than even thou knowest, Arete."

"For what reason, then, good husband?"

"I have often told thee, little mother, that I was a boy in a temple on the Nile, dedicated to Amun, or Ammon, as mine idolatrous name doth signify, and that at an early age I fled therefrom and betook myself to the river and to the sea, and did prosper so that I got first an interest in a ship, and afterward the sole ownership thereof, and made many long and prosperous voyages. I have told thee, also, in all details, how, on a voyage from Alexandria unto Italy, the storm drove us upon a rocky island where our destruction seemed imminent, until, while we all were momently expecting death, a quiet and almost unnoticed passenger, who had come from Antioch unto Alexandria and was journeying with us to Puteoli, did pray for us to Jesus Christ, and stilled the storm, and so saved the ship and all our lives. I have often told thee how this good Bishop of Antioch did lead me into the knowledge and love of Christ, and how I sold my ship and cargo, and gave one half of my property to the Church, that other Egyptians might be converted, and with the other moiety bought this farm, having known the pleasant coasts of Cyrenaica for many years; and then returned to Alexandria to bring thee hither that we might as stewards of the Lord manage this estate together. But I did not tell thee that when the bishop asked me whether I experienced any vocation for the preaching of the word, and I did tell the holy man that neither natural gifts nor education fitted me for that sacred calling, I did then vow to the Lord that if any son were given unto me I would teach him as far as I might be able to do in the love and learning of the gospel, and would send him unto Antioch to be more thoroughly instructed. So thou seest, dear little mother, that not only thine and mine own inclinations, but also mine obligation given unto God, bindeth me to bestow upon the boy all the teaching I can give unto him, and to afford to him every reasonable opportunity for greater learning. And I pray that he may escape the physical infirmity which, even more than the lack of learning, hath kept me from the public ministry of the word!"

"It is a strange and perplexing thing," laughed Arete, "and yet amusing. For all the Christians of our region rely upon thy strong good sense and modest learning in every private matter, whether of business or of religion; yet it seemeth so pitiful that, if thou standest upon thy feet to speak to any assembly, thou dost straightway begin to jerk and wriggle like a serpent, and to hiss and stammer so that thou canst not talk intelligibly, although thou hast more brains and learning than many who are eloquent."

"I long thought it to be my duty to try to overcome these physical defects, but, if at any time my heart is deeply moved, I can not talk, and it is useless to try it any more. We shall strive both by teaching and by prayer to train the boy better."

"Dost thou not remember, Ammonius, that evening in our boat upon the dear old Nile, what a distressful time thou didst endure in thine attempt to ask me to become thy wife?" And the little woman laughed and laughed until her eyes were full of happy tears.

"Yea," answered Ammonius, "nor indeed do I think that I did ever ask thee at all. I did, after many efforts, get thee to say what words thou wouldst have a man use who loved thee and wanted thee to be his wife, and all I could do was to cry out, 'I say that to thee, Arete--I say all that and more!' and in mine embarrassment verily I could utter nothing else!"

"But," laughed the little woman, "afterward I did make thee say the words over and over again, albeit I might almost as soon have trained a parrot to repeat them."

"But I trust thou hast never regretted the trouble thou didst take in teaching me how to court thee," said Ammonius.

"Nay, verily," she answered, "but I think it was the most amusing courtship that hath ever happened."

And, while husband and wife pleasantly conversed, old Thopt brought the child back to his mother, and announced that Christian women from other farms along the coast had come to offer their congratulations and any assistance that might be needed. It was singular to observe that while the adjacent country, from Apollonia to Cyrene, and all around, was settled by Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, and Romans, and while some women and girls of all of these nationalities, during the next few days, made visits of sympathy to the family at Baucalis, none came except those who were known to each other to be Christians, no matter what their nationality might be. Practically the faith of Jesus had broken down all ethnic, social, and political barriers among those who professed it; and the only class distinction which was recognized at all was between those who were Christians and those who were not. The persecution, which had begun seven years before under the Emperor Valerian, had raged in Libya as fiercely as in any portion of the Roman Empire, and, although intermittent in its character, there had quite recently been cruelties enough, extending in some instances to martyrdom, chiefly at the instigation of Jewish and pagan priests, to render it necessary for the Christians to conduct their religious rites and social intercourse with a certain degree of secrecy, and to preserve their ancient means of instantaneous recognition in constant use, so that, when a Christian might meet any one who was not familiarly known to him, an almost imperceptible sign served as a challenge by which he was instantly enabled to tell, without an inquiry or a spoken word, whether the stranger might be a Christian or not. Of course, if any one came who failed to recognize the sign, another movement, almost as imperceptible, served to warn all Christians present that there was one near them who did not profess their faith; so that there was little danger in their usual intercourse with each other or with their pagan neighbors.

On the eighth day after the birth of the boy, a few Christians assembled at the farm, and the services of a presbyter of Cyrene were procured. They first engaged in singing and in prayer, and then a portion of the gospel was read and the communion administered, after which the child was baptized. Preparatory to this ceremony there was quite a discussion among them as to the name by which the boy should be baptized, the young mother being desirous to call him by the name of some of the holy men who had suffered martyrdom for Jesus, or had otherwise become especially dear and honored throughout the Christian communities. To this the fatal objection was urged that such a selection of a name might arouse evil-minded neighbors to the fact that there were Christians among them, and so render the family unnecessarily and perhaps dangerously obnoxious to the malice of any who might ever harbor ill-will against them. Ammonius insisted upon calling the boy after the name of a Roman who had been his partner in the old sea-faring days, and whom he had highly esteemed, although he might be still a pagan so far as Ammonius knew; and so the child was finally christened "Arius."

"It is almost the Greek name of the god of war whom the heathen worship," said the presbyter.

"He shall be a warrior," answered Ammonius--"a soldier of Christ; and the military designation is not inappropriate."

"It is almost the name for a ram!" said another.

"I desire him to become the leader of a flock," said Ammonius, "and the name is well enough."

"It is almost the name of one of the signs of the zodiac," said another.

"I pray that the boy's thoughts and hopes may be fixed upon celestial things," said Ammonius, "and the name is well enough."

"It almost signifies that he shall be most lean and spare," said yet another.

"I would not desire him to look like a glutton or a drunkard," said Ammonius, "and surely the name is well enough."

"It may signify 'entreated' or 'supplicated,' or 'execrated,' or 'accursed,'" said the presbyter, "and is certainly a strange name."

"I would ever have him sought after by the good and hated by the evil," answered Ammonius, "and I will not change the name. Let him be called Arius. Besides," he added, "what is in a name? Mine own idolatrous name signifieth 'dedicated to Am-un,' yet I hope ye take me to be a Christian. I call the farm Baucalis, from the murmur of the waters on the garden shore, but ye call it Boucalis, because it breedeth good cattle. Arius!--what doth it matter whether it meaneth this or that? I know it for the name of an honorable man and faithful friend, and, if the boy become what I hope to see him, he shall make both the name Baucalis and Arius loved and honored by the faithful everywhere. If he turneth out ill, a prouder name might be disgraced by him; therefore let him be called Arius."

And so the babe was christened.

"I perceive," said the presbyter, after the religious services were ended and all of them partook of suitable refreshments and engaged in conversation, "that thou hast fixed thy heart upon having this child devoted unto the service of our Lord. It seemeth strange to me that, having such a pious desire for him, thou that art learned and intelligent hast never thyself sought to preach the gospel of our Lord!"

"I might truly have rejoiced so to do," answered Ammonius, "but that the python's influence prevented me."

"The python!" exclaimed the presbyter; "why, brother, what can the serpent have to do with thee?"

"This," replied Ammonius. "Some time before I came into the world, at Alexandria, to which great city strangers resort from the four quarters of the world even as unto imperial Rome, there came certain priests out of India to witness the ceremonies of a great festival in honor of a new Apis, and in their train certain jugglers who wrought various wonders, and carried with them immense pythons which they had charmed and rendered harmless. While my mother stood on the propylon of our house, watching the vast procession, one of the pythons, that had its tail entwined round the neck and body of an Indian passing below, suddenly sprang up out of its coil erect, and brandished its hideous head before my mother's face, so that she fainted thereat with terror. When I came into the world she was horrified at being able to trace out in the conformation of my head and face the similitude of the cobra; and with many prayers and offerings she had me early dedicated to Ammon, thinking that perchance the idol might remove the peculiarity of my features which made me loathsome in her sight by continually recalling the fearful image of the python. As I grew older, this conformation largely faded out, but all my life, whenever my feelings or passions are aroused, involuntary action of the muscles runneth from the feet upward, and maketh me to writhe like a serpent, and throweth a sibilant sharpness into my voice, so that anything like public speaking is well-nigh impossible to me; and I am compelled to master all emotions and to preserve a perfect serenity of mind, in order to avoid this serpentine appearance which is distressful to some and fearful unto others, and am compelled to speak in the slow, methodical manner thou hearest. But for this affliction, I would gladly have entered into the public service of the Master. God grant that my boy inherit not this strange malady! Pray thou for him."

"Yea, most gladly and earnestly will I," said the presbyter. "But repine thou not, my brother; for, although thou preachest not publicly, thy godly walk and conversation are a living sermon, which all who know thee must ponder with delight and edification."

And afterward the presbyter departed, and all who had attended the service went each one his own way, with sincerest benedictions upon the little family of Baucalis, and warmest sympathy with the earnest desire of the parents that their babe might live and grow up to be a minister of Christ.

CHAPTER III.

HOW MEN LIVED IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

Soon the ripple of excitement caused by the arrival of the young Arius at the Baucalis farm passed away, and the life of the dwellers there resumed its wonted quiet. Ammonius, generally bareheaded and naked from the waist up and from the knees down, as the custom of the country was, his olive skin glistening with healthful perspiration, pursued the various labors of the farm, and his wife attended to the fruits and vegetables nigh the house; and old Thopt prepared their food, and did the washing which their simple style of living rendered necessary; and both women devoted the hours not otherwise employed to the manufacture of woolen, cotton, and linen goods for domestic uses. Neither Jewish, Greek, nor Roman women generally adopted the luxurious manners and elegance of dress and ornament common to noble or opulent Egyptians; and those Egyptians who dwelt in the agricultural portions of Cyrenaica, especially those who were Christians, followed the simpler manners of the same classes among their neighbors. At the Baucalis farm everything about the house was scrupulously clean and neat, manifestly designed for comfort and convenience, nothing for ostentation. In the business of the place, out-doors and in-doors, there was never seen any of that driving spirit which indicates a thirst for accumulation, but all duties were prosecuted as if reasonable diligence were esteemed to be both a duty and a pleasure. At the end of a year's labor Ammonius would have felt no concern at all if he had found that he had not gained a single coin beyond the sum requisite to pay taxes, but he would have experienced a humiliating sense of shame and unworthiness if the occupant of so fine a farm had failed to have enough and to spare for every call of charity, for every reasonable claim upon his hospitality, or for liberal contribution to every work in which the Church was interested. Corn, wheat, and barley, variously prepared for table use, a large variety of fruits both preserved and fresh, and many kinds of vegetables, formed their chief food. Fish of choice kinds, and in great abundance, was in common use, and domestic fowls were raised by all. The consumption of flesh was not an everyday thing with these simple and healthful people. Twice, or, at most, thrice a week neighbors would club together and kill and part among themselves a kid or sheep. Beef was little used among them, and was raised for market chiefly. Swine's flesh they never used, and they wondered at the Roman appetite for coarse, strong meat dishes. The light, pleasant wine made everywhere along the coast was in general use among them all. The every-day dress of both sexes was cotton cloth, a short kilt reaching from the shoulder to the knee, and over this, when not actively at work, a loose gown covering the person from neck to ankle, and confined at the waist with a girdle or sash of bright-colored cloth. They had garments of finest wool and linen for extraordinary occasions.

In this region the Christian communities were not formally organized upon the communistic basis of the primitive Church, because all of them were in a nearly equally prosperous condition, and there were none among them who were "poor" in the sense of requiring assistance. The few that were in any way incapacitated for earning a livelihood were related by ties of blood to one or more families, able and always willing to afford them every needful comfort and assistance. But no Christian family was ever known to refuse anything for which a needy person asked, in money, clothing, food, or whatever they possessed; and in this respect it made little difference what might be the religion or nationality of the applicant. To refuse to give to one that asked would have seemed to any of these Christians to be a wicked, almost sacrilegious, violation of the very words of Jesus: "Give to him that asketh, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away." They regarded all property of Christians as in the ownership of the Church, and themselves only as stewards intrusted with the management of this or that portion thereof. Hence every call of presbyter or bishop for assistance to less fortunate communities, and every individual application for aid, was gladly and promptly responded to; and they regarded it as part of their profession of faith to find some healthful occupation for every one that was able and willing to do anything for the common good. In the cities of Cyrenaica were many Christians engaged in multiform avocations, but even there the Christian communities were so temperate and diligent that few among them wanted anything; and the union of the faithful furnished such a perfect safeguard against the ills of life that they were not only able to care for those of their own number who might be overtaken by any calamity, but were always able and willing to afford assistance to foreign communities less fortunately situated, when requested so to do. In short, all and far more than modern "poor-laws," Masonic, Odd-Fellows', and other eleemosynary associations, marine, life, and fire companies, have been enabled to do toward the amelioration of the condition of the unfortunate, was far more perfectly accomplished by these Christian communities, that recognized as a matter of faith the principle of all human charity which extends beyond mere alms-giving, that the average prosperity of the community should extend to each individual thereof when overtaken by any misfortune--a redeeming principle which Jesus and his apostles taught in its most perfect and effective form as the "communion of saints," the partnership or fellowship of the holy ([Greek: koinônia ton hagiôn]); community of property and rights among all who believe; a principle which good men have been vainly seeking to restore in some form ever since the subversion of Christianity, in the fourth century, by the agency of numberless nugatory statutes and associations; a divine truth which in its Christless forms of "communism," "socialism," and "Nihilism," now threatens the very existence of law and order throughout Christendom; a system perhaps impossible to any government which recognizes the legality of private-property rights, and is therefore committed to Mammon-worship.

But these Christians had learned a higher truth than any known to human laws: they were the owners of nothing; they were only stewards of their Lord's goods; the wealth which they accumulated and held for the common good was to them "true riches"; the wealth which any individual held for himself and his own private aggrandizement was the "mammon of unrighteousness." Hence no Christian could be in want while the community was prosperous; no community could suffer while any other communities accessible to them by land or sea had anything to spare; and the faith of Christ made the general prosperity of all Christians insure the individual prosperity of each one; so that there were no "rich" and no "poor" among them.

Plato's dreams of a perfect community ("Republic") admitted human slavery--Jesus Christ taught the freedom, equality, and fraternity of all men: Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" abolished marriage, and proposed to hold women in common--Jesus Christ elevated marriage into a sacrament; denied man's right to "hold" woman at all; proclaimed freedom and equality for her also, repudiating the universal idea that she was a chattel, and teaching that she is a soul endowed with the same rights, duties, and responsibilities as are inherent in the soul of man. Modern reformers propose to "divide" out all property, and limit individual acquisitions thereof; but Jesus proposed to divide out nothing, and to limit nothing; but, that all things should be accumulated, owned, and used in common, as every one hath need, just as air, and sunlight, and the boundless sea are common. The word "catholic" ([Greek: kata holos]) was unknown to Jesus and the New Testament; the word "common" ([Greek: koiyos]) was the key to all of his teachings, social, spiritual, and political.

The only relation which these Christians sustained to the "government" of Cyrenaica, or to that of Rome, was to pay the taxes demanded of them; and they had no concern as to who might be emperor or proconsul, except so far as these rulers might be disposed to persecute the Christians, or otherwise. They paid taxes, to avoid giving offense, even as Jesus himself had paid tribute, although born under Roman rule, and not a "stranger," and not liable to pay tribute; but they never acknowledged the Roman authority in any other way. It would have been an ineffaceable stigma on the character of a Christian to summon another Christian before a civil magistrate for any cause; they would not "go to law before the heathen." If any differences arose between any, they left it to some of the brethren to consider the matter and adjust it; and they considered themselves bound to abide by the settlement reached, by bonds of faith and love stronger than human statutes can be made. If any became careless of right and duty, or actively wicked, his nearest friends remonstrated with him, and, if he refused to abandon his sinful course, the presbyters reproved him; and, if this proved ineffectual in working out the needed reformation, they brought the offender before the Church, and either succeeded in drawing him back into the right way, or, if he proved incorrigible, they simply refused henceforth to fellowship with him, and held him as a publican and a sinner. They never had recourse to any temporal penalties to enforce the law of Christian brotherhood; knowing that no one who refused to be controlled without the use of force was a Christian, they publicly disowned him, and that was the end of it. For they had been taught from the beginning that the essential difference between the kingdom of heaven and every other kingdom established upon earth consisted in the fact that human governments recognize private property-rights in estates, rank, offices, prerogatives, and seek to enforce these legal, fictitious rights by temporal penalties, contrary to reason and justice; while Jesus denounced all such private rights as Mammon-worship, and all statutes enacted to enforce them as lies of the Scribes and Pharisees; and never fixed, and never authorized his apostles to fix, any temporal penalties whatever. They understood perfectly well that the necessary and inevitable result of all law-and-order systems is to produce a ruling class at the top of every political fabric to whom all of its benefits inure, an oppressed or enslaved people at the bottom upon whose weary shoulders rest all of the burdens and the waste of life, and between these extremes ecclesiasticisms and an army (always on the side of the ruling classes and against the multitudes) seeking to adjust their mutual legal rights and duties by the agency of bayonets and prayer--a system of laws creating fictitious rights, creating legal offenses by the disregard of these pretended rights, and denouncing legal penalties. But they knew that Jesus died as much for the children of Barabbas as for the offspring of Herod; and that every statute, custom, or superstition which attempts to make one of the babies "better" than the others is a fraud on our common humanity and a violation of the law of Christ. For the kingdom of heaven was organized upon the basis of community of rights and property among all who believe, thereby removing all inducements to commit such crimes as treason, larceny, and fraud, which exist only by force of the statutes creating and punishing them; for civilization itself is the parent of all crime except murder or lust, which might sometimes occur from the mere ebullition of brutal passion and instinct in low and base natures. Hence those Christians, who "called nothing they possessed their own," regarding themselves as only stewards of the Lord's goods, held by them for the common good of all believers, had no use for the Roman government or any other, and cared nothing for it except so far as taxes and persecutions, imposed or omitted, might affect the temporal welfare of individuals and of the communities of which they were members. They were citizens of a kingdom in but not of the world, desiring to be at peace with all worldly kingdoms. They knew that Jesus proclaimed a good news or gospel for the poor, the very foundation-stone of which is the absolute equality, liberty, and fraternity of man; and they learned from the same divine Teacher that kings, lords, nobles, all personal and class distinctions among men, are the mere creation of legal fiction, sustained by unjust force, like slavery and piracy, and do not exist in the nature of things or by the will of God; and that these laws are everywhere only the utterances of selfishness crystallized into the form of statutes, customs, or decrees, government over the people being nothing more nor less than an organized expression of faith in the ancient lie that private property (in estates, rank, or prerogatives) is the one thing sacred in human life, and that laws and penalties are necessary to maintain it; which faith is the idolatry of Mammon, the only paganism that Jesus denounced by name, and declared to be utterly antagonistic to the worship of God. They understood, therefore, that in place of attempting (as all human legislators have ever done) to provide a more perfect law-and-order system for the protection of private rights, our Lord designed to abolish all private property, and with it all the unjust laws and penalties by which the worship of Mammon is maintained. Hence, in place of teaching to men a better slave-code than the world had known before, Jesus taught freedom for all men. In place of teaching a more effective art of war, he proclaimed the gospel of peace, love, justice. In place of ordaining only more wise and just regulations for governing the intercourse of men with their female chattels, he elevated monogamic marriage into a holy sacrament, and applied to man and wife alike the same divine law of personal rights, duties, and responsibilities. In place of teaching better laws for the government of men by other men as erring, sinful, and selfish as themselves, he taught that all such laws and government are unnecessary to any people who believe that there is something more sacred, higher, and holier than private rights, and are willing by faith to renounce all human, statutory advantages in order to acquire divine truth.

So in beautiful Cyrenaica, while Greek and Roman, Egyptian and Jew, concerned themselves about politics, and struggled for offices, and toiled beyond measure for useless gain, the Christian communities pursued the calm and even tenor of their way, meeting on every Sabbath for religious services and instruction; closing each week-day's labor with a pleasant formula of evening prayer; training up their sons and daughters to despise all the false statutory and customary distinctions and vanities of worldly life "after which the Gentiles seek"; teaching them to seek knowledge, especially the knowledge peculiar to their faith; to love all men, especially the brethren; and to regard this earthly life as but the threshold of a higher, holier, and more perfect state of being that lay only a few brief, fleeting years away from every one of them. And so, while the sun arose and set; while the harvests were grown and garnered; while the pure and fadeless sea lapsed along the fertile garden of the Baucalis farm, and new lives came upon the stage of human action, and older ones were gathered into the rest appointed for all the living, peace and plenty, charity and love, purity and truth, blessed the dwellers at the stone cottage by the sea-side.

CHAPTER IV.

FINE TRAINING FOR A CHRISTIAN MAN!

The boy Arius increased in stature, and learned, even before he had learned the alphabet, to think that he knew and loved the Lord. For from the time that he could talk, daily, after the little family had completed their healthful tasks, they spent an hour in repeating to him, and in teaching him to repeat after them, some simple passage out of the New Testament, so that the child had memorized a whole gospel before he had learned to read the written text, and become familiar with the general course of the Old Testament Scriptures, particularly with the salient and beautiful narratives wherewith the sacred word abounds. After he grew older his father taught him both to speak and write the Latin and Hebrew equivalent of every word in the Greek text; so that Arius acquired the three languages together. The father watched with intense and painful anxiety to ascertain whether the singular affliction which his mother's terror of the python had entailed upon himself had been transmitted to his son, and rejoiced to see that, while some unmistakable traces thereof appeared in the boy's voice and manner, they were so slight as not only not to be unpleasantly obtrusive, but were even attractive, as perhaps every marked peculiarity, which is of a graceful character, is attractive in a man.

At twelve years of age, Arius was an unusually tall and slender lad, peculiar in the shape of his bold, shaggy head, peculiar in the length and litheness of his shapely neck, peculiar in the mesmeric luminosity of his dark and tender eyes, and in the singular but incisive sweetness of his voice. He spoke, wrote, and read Greek and Latin with fluency, and was well informed in the Hebrew tongue; and yet he was scarcely conscious of the fact that under his father's wise and careful training he had been a student almost from his infancy, so steadily, easily, and gradually, had he progressed in the acquisition of knowledge. The New Testament written on parchments in the uncial text; the "Pastor of Hermas," which, in those days, was thought to be of almost apostolical authority; and copies of some of the letters of Polycarp, Irenæus, and Clement, were almost the only books which Ammonius owned, as the cost of a library in those days was enormous. From these they would read a few verses at a time, and translate them into Latin as they went along. A presbyter at Cyrene loaned them the Old Testament, from which the boy copied and memorized such parts as his father directed him to learn, as having the directest bearing upon the life and doctrine of Jesus. The boy did his full share of labor in all the working of the farm, and took the bath daily in the little bay on which it fronted (as in fact all the family were accustomed to do), and at night father, mother, and son, read and translated from the Scriptures; and occasionally the boy was made to stand up and repeat by rote the Apostles' Creed, the Paternoster, the Prayer of Agur, the son of Jakeh, Paul's beautiful hymn in praise of Agape, or some other favorite passage, sometimes in one language and sometimes in another. In these little recitations, as often as the boy's feelings were enlisted, there came a peculiar and fascinating sibilation into his voice; his hand, chiefly the right hand, would move and wave with a strange, easy, vibrant motion, almost as if it involuntarily strove to accentuate the syllables of the sonorous text; his head would dart up and lean slightly forward from the long and shapely neck, like the crest of some splendid cobra, peering forward toward the hearer, and his dark eyes dilated with a strange mesmeric light; and altogether the lad had a very peculiar and impressive appearance. But these slight hereditary traces of the python's influence were never unpleasantly obtrusive, and the father did not think it to be necessary to impose upon the son that life-long self-restraint and self-consciousness which, in his own case, had been requisite to guard himself against serpentine manifestations of emotion. But his own long and careful effort and study in this respect qualified him to impart to the boy a marvelously distinct and peculiar accentuation, which made every word he uttered as clear and perfect as a pearl--as distinct and resonant as trumpet-notes.

But while Ammonius was thus cautious and diligent in training his son to acquire critical exactness in his knowledge of the philology and history of the sacred text, he was not the less anxious to imbue his mind with the very spirit that distills upon the faithful heart out of the words of uncorrupted truth. This he strove to do by continually spurring the boy's intelligence to seek for the real significance of our Lord's life and teachings, the differences between his philosophy and ethics and those of other renowned moralists and teachers; the essential differences between the kingdom which Jesus established in the world and all worldly kingdoms; the great fact, indeed, that Jesus taught not only the purest ethics in a few sweeping principles which cover the whole range of human life and experience, but taught also social and political truth essential to the establishment and maintenance of human rights and liberty. Yet the man's instructions were not dogmatic; they belonged to no sect or system of religion or of philosophy; they consisted chiefly in exciting in the mind of the youth an honest desire to know the truth, and of questions and suggestions designed to aid him in discovering it for himself. The manner of instruction generally pursued by Ammonius may be gathered from one or two of their evening exercises, like the following.

The boy read this passage: "Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached unto them. And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me."

Then said Ammonius, "What lesson dost thou understand to be taught in this place, Arius?"

"Obviously it teacheth," answered the boy, "that John desired to know of Jesus whether he might be 'he that should come,' that is, Christ. In place of answering the question directly, he pointed them to the miracles which they saw him even then performing, as if he knew that these wonderful works would be sufficient to satisfy John of his divinity. This and other passages seem also to show that miracles are the only proper evidence that can be offered that Jesus is the Christ."

"All that is on the surface," answered Ammonius, "and is well enough. But canst thou see nothing deeper in the words? Is there nothing strange in the answer of Jesus that provoketh inquiry, or needeth comment? Read the passage again, Arius, and see what else thou canst find in it."

Then the lad reread the passage very carefully, and he said: "The blind receive sight: a miracle; the lame walk: a second miracle; the lepers are cleansed: a third miracle; the deaf hear: a fourth miracle; the dead are raised up: a fifth and greater miracle. It seemeth strange to me that our Lord should add, as if it were a greater miracle than all the others, and the crowning proof of his Messiahship, the fact that the poor have the gospel preached unto them. Is it a fact, father, that before the coming of Jesus the gospel had never been preached unto the poor? Was the Jewish scripture only for the rich?"

Ammonius smiled, but answered: "The rolls of the law, the Jewish scriptures, were read on the Sabbath-day in every synagogue, and both the rich and the poor were required to be present and hear it. Perhaps the gospel of which Jesus speaks was not in the Jewish scriptures, or else was only taught in laws and prophecies which the Jews had not correctly interpreted."

"But it could not have been our gospel," said Arius, "for no part of the New Testament was then written. I wonder what this gospel was; and why it was good news to the poor rather than to the rich; and why our Lord said that whoever should not take offense at the gospel was blessed. Why should any one take offense at it? Why did they crucify him for proclaiming it? Why did the chief priests and rulers of the people so bitterly hate the gospel?"

"If thou wilt follow up these questions and learn the true answers thereto," said Ammonius, "thou wilt get hold of a fine, large truth!"

"Wilt thou aid me therein?"

"Yea, so far as I am able to do so; and to that end I ask thee if thou canst tell what reason is repeatedly given in the gospels why the Pharisees 'were offended' at our Lord's teachings; why they 'derided' him; in a word, why they hated him and his gospel?"

"Yea! The reason that is always given for their hatred of Jesus is that they were 'covetous'?"

"Dost thou think that the fact that they were rich and covetous could account for their rejection of their own scriptures, which showed them the Messiah plainly, and in which they all believed, unless the gospel which Jesus taught in some way antagonized their legal right to their property?"

"Nay, verily," said the boy. "The gospel must have interfered with their property, or the fact that they were 'covetous' would not be given as the reason for their hatred of Jesus."

"Then let us examine what this gospel was that was 'good news to the poor.' Dost thou remember any other place in which the same words occur?"

"Yea," answered Arius. "It is written in Luke: 'And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath-day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it is written, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor: he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives; and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all of them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.'"

"Now canst thou find the place in Isaiah referred to in the text?"

"Yea," replied Arius; "it readeth as follows: 'The spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because he hath anointed me to preach good tidings.'"

"Stop," said Ammonius; "thou seest that the 'gospel' is the same thing which the prophet calleth 'good tidings?'"

"Yea," answered the lad, "but whence cometh this expression of 'the acceptable year of the Lord,' and what signifieth it?"

"It cometh from the statute of the year of jubilee, set forth at large in the book of Leviticus. When thou shalt examine this statute fully, thou shalt find that it is emphatically a law against private property, providing that debts expire every seventh year, and that all Israel was prohibited from seeking to make gain every seventh year, and from saving what they had already made. Thou wilt see that it was a statute restoring all real estate every fiftieth year to the original possessors thereof, and providing for the release of all prisoners, the manumission of all slaves, the cessation of all oppressions--a year of joy to all that were poor and afflicted. Thou wilt see that Isaiah, and other prophets also, foretold that this great and acceptable year of jubilee was simply a type of the condition, social and political, which should be established permanently in the kingdom of heaven: and that our Lord declared that this prophecy was fulfilled in himself. Thou wilt find, if thou shalt grasp this one truth in its fullness, that the gospel which was good news to the poor was simply the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning Christ--the permanent establishment of 'the acceptable year'; and that the Pharisees, who were rich and 'covetous,' hated the gospel because it required all who believe to hold all rights and property in common for the good of all; and they preferred their own selfish aggrandizement to the common good of all; and thou wilt see that the chief priests and rulers of the people conspired together to crucify Jesus, not because they ever doubted his divinity and Messiahship, but because they worshiped Mammon more than God. For the same reason, Rome, that welcomed every heathen superstition under heaven, and built a Pantheon for all the gods, persecuted the Christians from the very beginning, because the gospel of our Lord is eternally opposed to Mammon-worship, war, slavery, polygamy, and the princes and powers of the earth--a kingdom in which Christ only is king, and all men are brethren."

"And it must have been hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," said Arius, "only because he had to consecrate all earthly possessions to the common Church, and abdicate all human titles and prerogatives."

"Yea," said Ammonius, "that was the property-law laid down by Jesus; and it was verily easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to comply with the law. But thou shouldst trace this truth through all the laws of the Jews, through all the prophecies and through all the parables of Christ; and thou wilt then understand how the law was a schoolmaster leading men to Jesus. Thou wilt understand how it is that in the Church all are free, equal, and fraternal, while in all other kingdoms there are kings, princes, lords; masters, and slaves; the rich and the poor; and universal selfishness, pride, ambition, usury, extortion, licentiousness, oppression, and wrong; and thou wilt more and more love and worship our blessed Lord for establishing the only system upon which true liberty and true religion ever will be possible for the masses of mankind."

Then the bright, patient, hopeful student resolved that he would never cease to read and to ponder upon the fullness of the gospel until he had thoroughly explored all the possible bearings of the divine, social, political, and spiritual system of our Lord upon human life, and its relations to all other kingdoms organized on earth. The lad had learned more than the meaning of an isolated text; he had found a broad principle that rests at the very basis of all profitable reading and interpretation of the sacred word.

And in this sort of school he learned the wisdom of the primitive Church.

CHAPTER V.

A PAGAN HERMIT, OLD AND GRAY.

At the age of sixteen, the lad Arius was very thoroughly informed in knowledge of the kingdom of heaven as that knowledge had been taught in the Church from the very days of Jesus and the twelve. In those days the only written authorities relied upon by Christians were the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The letters of Paul, especially those written against Judaism, the epistles of Peter, of John, of Jude, of Hermas, Irenæus, Polycarp, and others, were held in high esteem as the deliberate utterances of wise and pious men; but even the humblest Christian never hesitated to quote the gospels and the Acts against any of them with whose opinions he was dissatisfied. The wilderness of creeds and dogmas which in later times grew up out of these epistles was entirely unknown to primitive Christianity; yet the perusal of them was advantageous to the young man in many ways. The journeys of Paul aroused in his active mind a keen desire to know more of the world, and of the religion, manners, and customs of other nations; and the knowledge that Ammonius had acquired of different lands and peoples, both by his sea-faring observations and by such reading and conversation as circumstances had rendered possible to him, seemed to have been absorbed by his son in the long years of constant and affectionate intercourse between them; and this was no small stock of information, for the Mediterranean was then in every sense the "middle" sea, the highway of the world; and it was impossible for a shrewd, intelligent ship-owner and sailor like Ammonius to navigate its waters for years without being brought into personal contact with men out of every nation under heaven.

In the same way the lad had almost unconsciously acquired an intimate knowledge of the fauna and flora of Cyrenaica, and in fact of Northern Libya, and could name almost every plant, animal, bird, and insect in the vicinity of Baucalis; so that even at this early age he had laid the foundations of future acquisitions in every department of knowledge that was in any way accessible unto him, and had acquired a sturdy habit of independent thought and examination about everything that came within the range of his observation.

On Sabbath evenings (the word Sunday was then unknown to the Christian world) he loved to wander along the sea-shore, or through the wooded mountains that everywhere around Baucalis rose up from the water's edge and rolled away like gigantic and immovable billows high and higher southwardly toward the great Barcan plateau.

On one bright afternoon he had wandered farther westward than ever before, going far beyond the limits of the land appurtenant to the farm. He was weary with climbing over the endless hills, and reclined to rest upon a projecting rock beneath an ample shade of forest-trees, and gazed away over the calm and brilliant expanse of the peaceful Mediterranean. But not long had he rested there when his quick ear caught the sound of slow and measured footfalls as some unseen person paced slowly back and forth upon a diminutive plateau that stretched still farther westwardly along the mountain-side. The intervening foliage hid the person from sight, and, the lad's curiosity being aroused by the presence of a stranger in a spot so secluded, he quietly went forward, and a few steps brought him to the place where this little stretch of level ground had been carefully denuded of trees and seemed to be cultivated as a garden. Then he saw a tall, gray-haired, venerable-looking man, with downcast eyes, and slow, deliberate step, coming in his direction along a narrow walk that led directly through the cultivated land. Almost at the same instant the aged man perceived him also, but quietly pursued his way, and, when he had come near, Arius respectfully bowed and saluted him. The ancient returned his salutation, and added words which the boy did not understand, but the lad said, in the Greek tongue, then in common use throughout Cyrenaica: "I think thou speakest the language of Egypt, which I do not comprehend. If thou wilt speak in Latin or in Greek, I can understand thy wishes or thine orders."

The old man gazed at him in astonishment, but answered in the Greek tongue: "Surely thou art an Egyptian!--and in the course of a long life I have never met with a son of Egypt that could not speak his mother-tongue if he could speak at all!"

"Yea, sir," answered Arius, "I am altogether a son of Egypt, although born on an adjacent farm, but my parents would never use that language, and, while they carefully instructed me in Greek and in Latin and in Hebrew, and in the Aramean tongue of the Israelites now in use, they would never permit me to learn an Egyptian word."

"Strange enough!" said the ancient. "Dost thou know any reason why thy parents thus forbade thee to acquire the primitive and wonderful old speech of the land of Kem?"

"Yea, sir," answered Arius. "I have heard my father say that in his childhood he was placed in a temple and dedicated to Ammon, and that when he grew older he liked neither the temple nor the god, and fled away to follow another course of life; and I think that he believed the language of the Nile region to possess some peculiar power over every son of Egypt, and that to preserve me from that influence, whatever it may be, he desired of me that I would never seek to learn that speech--at least not for many years to come."

"And thy father was wise," cried the ancient; "for, if ever the powers of darkness gave any gift to man, it surely was the strange language of the dwellers by the Nile. Centuries before there were any such peoples as Greeks and Romans, centuries before the Israelites became a nation, so long ago that the universe seems growing old since then, and the earth itself hath nodded out of the line on which the mighty pyramid was built up to point to the polar star, even then, boy, the language of Egypt was a perfect instrument of thought, adapted with superhuman cunning to the purposes of idolatry, with rhythms and intonations in the utterance of it, that prick the sensuality of human nature like a goad, and deaden conscience with some mysterious, witch-like power which the intelligence can no more resist than the charmed bird can escape the python's fascination, and no more explain than it can explain why the iron touched by the magic stone pointeth for evermore unto the north. It is the natural language of sensualism and idolatry, and ought to be blotted out of human speech. I tell thee, lad, thy father was wise to forbid thee from seeking to acquire that fearful tongue!"

"But thou art thyself an Egyptian," said Arius, "and I suppose thou hast long used the wonderful language which thou dost condemn."

"Yea," answered the ancient, "but the speech I use is the hieratic form, invented by the priests for the very purpose of keeping their souls free from the polluting power of the popular forms of speech, to which a pure thought or expression is well-nigh impossible. But didst thou come hither to seek me out," asked the ancient, "or was thy coming accidental? What is thy name? Of what religion art thou? Why hast thou come to me?"

The old man spoke hurriedly and apparently with much anxiety, and the boy could not conjecture the cause of his manifest excitement, but after a moment's reflection upon the bitter and strange denunciation of man's ancient speech, and the subsequent things spoken by his companion, he replied in singularly musical and persuasive tones, the mesmeric light burning in his eyes, the bold, peculiar head erect and slightly bending forward toward him whom he addressed: "My name, sir, is Arius; my coming hither is purely accidental, as I supposed this mountain-side to be entirely uninhabited; my religion is that of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!"

"Thou art a Christian," said the ancient, in tones of great astonishment; "so young too, but clear, bold, and settled in the new faith, as thy voice and manner undoubtedly proclaim. I am much pleased with thee, boy. Come thou with me, where I dwell alone, for I desire to speak with thee more fully. Wilt thou not come, Arius!"

"Willingly, sir, if the distance be not too great," replied the lad.

"It is very nigh," said the ancient; and then he turned and followed the path west for, perhaps, fifty yards, and then the path led southwardly for about the same distance, and stopped at an abrupt and densely wooded elevation in the side of the mountain. Arius saw that a rough but substantial stone wall formed the outside of a room that was for the most part composed of a cavity under the rock; and having passed through a door, on each side of which was a long, narrow window admitting light into the apartment, the ancient said: "Here is my dwelling, Arius; come thou within."

The room was nearly twenty feet square: the floor was smoothly covered with dry, white sand, procured perhaps by pulverizing sand-rocks taken from the mountain; there was a wooden table in the middle of the apartment, above which a huge oil-lamp was suspended, and a smaller table upon one side, upon which rested a complete service of beautifully fashioned earthen plates, cups, pitchers, dishes, and similar articles. There were several large and comfortable chairs made of huge reeds curiously interwoven, and a couch constructed of the same material, and covered deep but smoothly with lamb-skins, dressed with the wool on. Everything about the place indicated a rather coarse but genuine comfort, even to the presence of several beautiful goats that came with their kids to the door and gazed in at the old man with confidence and affection, as if he were a familiar and trustworthy friend.

"Be thou seated, my son," said the ancient, "and, if thou wilt eat, I have here goat's milk, bread, and dried fish and fruits in abundance."

"I am not an hungered," answered the lad, "but partake of the bread and milk to honor thy hospitality," which he did, and found both excellent. "Thy very palatable bread," he said, "is the same with that made at my home by Thopt, and is, she saith, the same that priests at Memphis always preferred to eat."

"Even so," replied the ancient, "and at Memphis for many years, indeed, I did eat thereof, and learned there the manner of the preparation of it."

And, when the lad had finished his slight repast, the old man said: "Thou art a Christian, boy; in what, then, dost thou believe? Tell me briefly, what dost thou believe?"

Then the lad stood up as he had been accustomed to do at home: the fine but peculiar head involuntarily erected itself upon his long and shapely neck, and drooped a little forward, a strange, scintillant light gleamed in his sweet, dark eyes; his elevated and extended right hand waved gently from side to side like the bâton of a music-master, and his musical, penetrating voice rang out clearly and incisively as he said: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, and buried; the third day he rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, in the holy common Church, in the forgiveness of sin, in the resurrection of the dead, and in the life everlasting. Amen!"

"So thou believest!" said the ancient. "But why dost thou say 'only-begotten' son? Are not all men the sons of God, even as the Greek poet saith, 'For we also are his offspring?'"

"Yea!" answered Arius, "all men are his sons by creation, and some of them by adoption--Jesus alone by generation; he was 'begotten,' not made."

"True! true!" said the ancient; "so teach the gospels, which I have here with me. So thou believest! When didst thou learn this faith, thou whole Egyptian; and dost thou never doubt it?"

"I know not when I learned it," answered Arius; "I was learning it from my mother when I lay helplessly upon her breast; I was learning it from my father when he dandled me upon his knees; every day and hour of my life I have learned it more and more;" and then, involuntarily rising upon his tiptoes, like a python standing upon its tail, with his head erect and bending slightly forward, and sparkling eyes agleam, he exclaimed, "and I was never such an idiot as to doubt it at all."

Then, as if modestly conscious of some impropriety in such demonstrative utterances in the presence of one so aged and venerable, he sank lower upon his chair with an ingenuous blush.

"O glorious certitude of youth and hope!" said the ancient, mournfully. "O bold, triumphant faith, fitting its possessor for happy and jubilant exertion in the accomplishment of all life's aims and purposes! Thou wast 'never such an idiot as to doubt it!' But I, that have seen nigh fourscore years of misery, do doubt it much and painfully. I that have mastered all the arts, science, and religion of ancient Egypt--a land that was wrinkled with age centuries before the era of old Moses; I that know both all that the priests of Kem ever taught the people, and also the higher and more recondite forms of ignorance in which the priests themselves believed--I verily know nothing! I can scarcely believe in anything save universal spiritual darkness, for which no day-spring cometh, and universal wretchedness, for which there is no cure. O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?"

The bloodless hands were clasped upon the ancient's aching breast, the noble gray head was bowed with hopeless sorrow, the weary eyes seemed dim with long and bitter anguish. Arius gazed upon him with astonishment and sympathy. Then the grand gifts of every born minister of Christ, the missionary's yearning to instruct, the physician's longing for the power to heal and to strengthen, moved in the boy's heart, and once more he sprang to his feet, and with extended hand that quivered with emotion like the python's tongue, and tearful, scintillant eyes, and head bent forward from the long, lithe neck, and a strange thrill in his vibrant musical voice, he cried: "Who shall deliver thee? Surely Jesus Christ, our Lord! He saveth even unto the uttermost all that come unto God by him. Believe and live!"

"So! so!" said the ancient, in tones of hopeless weariness. "Believe and live! Believe and live! 'He that believeth on me shall never die! He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live again.' O new, strange faith, hidden through all the dynasties like the Nile's undiscoverable source, yet ever hinted at in the few high, arid, half-intangible truths in which the priests of Ra believed! What if it be true? What if the spiritual dualism of the first cause, which the priests gradually elaborated into the splendid pageantry and elegant mysticism of Hesiri-Hes, and the offspring Horus, has at last become an actual truth by the incarnation of the spiritual Son of the one God that is necessarily a spiritual hermaphrodite? Through the long centuries the priests secretly sneered at the polytheisms which they taught to the people, and they did believe in one God that was utterly unknown to the masses of mankind, for whom they had neither name nor symbol; and they conceived him to be a dual entity, containing in himself the fullness of double spiritual sexhood; and they stood in awe of some grand revelation which they supposed would some time be made to mankind when this one, almighty, hermaphrodite spirit should 'beget' with one side of his spiritual nature and 'conceive' with the other, and incarnate its son in flesh, and save man by assuming human nature. This they saw foreshadowed in Hesiri-Hes; this was the mystery which the priests perceived in every Apis, the emblem of one 'hidden' like the fountains of the Nile; for in the hieratic language Hapi, which is 'hidden,' signifies both the sacred river and the sacred bull; for this they prepared the mummy that a body might be ready for the returning soul when 'the hidden' should be revealed; this, the sacred scarabæi dimly intimated, and this was the secret mystery that lurked beneath the veil of Hes that 'no mortal hand hath lifted.' Some such glorious revelation must have flitted past Greek Plato's vision, when he longed for a clearer statement of the will of God to men, and prophesied the coming man. This was the grand thought of Moses, the monotheist, when in the same breath he denounced all forms of polytheism, and yet designated the one God whom he worshiped by a name which is the plural number of a Hebrew noun"; and, as if he had forgotten the presence of Arius altogether, who sat listening to this strange monologue with silent wonder, the ancient continued the unconscious utterance of his fervid meditations: "So hath it been throughout the world with every ancientest form of all original myths; for while Assyria and the Medo-Persians and other comparatively modern nations, and afterward the Greeks and Romans, borrowed only the lower, vulgar forms which the Egyptians had fashioned for popular use, in China Chang and Eng symbolized the original conception of one dual God that afterward degenerated into anthropomorphism; and in India Indra and Agni, a primitive conception that antedates Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, by countless centuries, and is the burden of the ancientest and uncorrupted Rig-Veda, bears unequivocal testimony to the same primitive conception; and the Buddhas taught that they were, perhaps believed themselves to be, earthly manifestations of the spiritual self-conception of one dual God: for polytheism was never the original form of any primitive nation's faith, and every people that began with paganism borrowed from some older nation in which the original faith had already been degraded. Strange! most strange! Oh, if it could be proved! If it could only be proved that Jesus of Nazareth is, in very truth, the incarnation of that which was to be 'begotten' and 'conceived' of the one dual God, and born of a woman into the world, how grandly would the fact vindicate the primitive utterances of all human faith, and translate its vague but splendid dreams into a glorious reality! It must be true! Surely it must be true! For among Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, and Jews, this original faith preceded all idolatries!"

Then, buried in profoundest meditation, the old man ceased to speak. But after a time he roused himself, and looking upon the astonished youth he said: "And thou believest all this! thou hast 'never been such an idiot as to doubt it!' Happy art thou, boy, if thou shalt preserve unfalteringly and unquestioningly thy serene and all-reliant faith."

But the lad's sturdy independence of thought asserted itself, and he answered: "Nay, sir! I have professed faith in none of the things of which thou speakest. I believe in one God and in Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son, and in the Holy Ghost. I believe not in Hesiri-Hes, nor in Chang and Eng, nor in Indra and Agni, nor in any gods which Moses denounced as falsest idols. Nor in Jupiter, nor Venus, nor Mars, nor in any of the gods that came into fashion with the heathen long since Moses died."

The ancient smiled approvingly, and replied: "Thou art altogether in the right, my son. Many of the gods in which the nations believe were born long after the records kept by the Egyptian priests began; but all were born of the myths which Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian priests wove about the grand, primitive conception of one dual God. The idolaters of other lands received in various forms the mythologies which the priests wove about the most ancient, simple faith, which was primarily the same for all, only the children of Abraham refused to add anything to the original conception, clinging obstinately to the primitive monotheistic idea; and yet Moses designates the one God by his name of Adonai, the plural number of a Hebrew noun; and when the one God speaks of himself he uses the words 'we,' 'our,' and 'us': Let us make man in our own image and likeness. Thou seest that it would be contrary to reason that the original utterance of every faith should be the affirmation of God that was one, and yet more than one, unless the divine being is spiritually hermaphrodite, having a double spiritual sexhood. Thou seest that, if this were not so, Moses could not have used the plural number to designate one God. Thou seest that, if it were not so, the only act possible to God would have been creation, not generation; and thy faith in 'the only-begotten Son' must have been false; and the very ancientest forms of faith would have been demonstrated to be merely impossible falsehood--impossible, because there can not be a falsehood which does not originate in and grow out of a truth; for falsehood is a perversion or misconception of the truth; for falsehood is not that which hath no existence, but is the wrong statement or conception of that which doth exist. If it were not so, my son, thy faith in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, would be merest polytheism, for three are not one, nor is one three; but the three may be one divine nature and family. For the one God was always conceived of by the primary faiths as a dual being, possessed of both elements of spiritual sexhood perfectly; and 'begotten' is a proper thing to say of one side of the dual God, and 'conceived' is a proper thing to say of the other; and so thou mayst believe, without any imputation of polytheism, in Christ, as a being 'begotten,' not created; 'conceived,' not made. Would that I knew that Jesus of Nazareth is he!"

"This learning is entirely new to me," said the lad. "Perhaps it is higher than I am yet able to comprehend. I believe in just precisely what the gospels say, no more, no less; that Jesus is the Christ, only-begotten Son of God, conceived of the Holy Ghost, before there was a creation, and born of the Virgin into the world long after God by him had made all things that are created. But, with thy profound knowledge of all these mysteries, how is it that thou thyself dost not believe? Who and what art thou, thou ancient, learned, yet unhappy man, whom may our Lord soon bless and save?"

"I love thee, boy, but I am old, and now too weary to talk more with thee. Wilt thou not come unto me again? I desire to live in seclusion as I have done for years, and beg of thee to speak of me to none; but come again thyself whenever thou canst."

"I will return upon the seventh day hence," said Arius, "and speak of thee to none except my father's family, and thou wilt not be annoyed by them. And so fare-thee-well, sir, and may the peace of God come upon thee!"

"Amen!" said the ancient, "and farewell!"

CHAPTER VI.

FLOTSON OF THE MIDDLE SEA.

In the evening of that day upon which Arius encountered the strange old eremite upon the mountainside, draggled skirts of clouds swept across the northern horizon, and distant lightnings gleamed upon the waves. During the night the storm came nearer and nearer, and before sunrise the wind roared wildly over the Baucalis farm, and the troubled sea broke in foam and thunder for many a league along the coast. All day the tempest raged, but with nightfall the clouds broke away, although the turbulent waves continued to roll and tumble on the coast, and the angry waters gurgled through the narrow entrance into the little bay upon which Baucalis fronted. The dwellers at the farm watched the magnificent display from their open windows, but saw no sign of any ship belabored by the storm, and, after their usual religious exercises, retired to rest, thankful that there seemed to be no wreck along their coasts. During the night the sea ran down, and when Arius, early in the beautiful morning, went to the garden's edge beside the water, there was only a gentle swell perceivable upon the bosom of the deep, and a faint murmur of the waters crowding into and out of the narrow opening of the bay with a gurgling noise from which the farm derived its name. The lad pursued his usual occupation, until his attention was caught by a sound under the bank below him, as if some one gently and regularly struck upon the rock; and the boy then stepped forward, and, parting with his hands the fringe of shrub and weeds that grew upon the verge of the land, he gazed down into the waters of the bay, and at once discovered that the unusual sounds were made by the striking of the ends of some spars that composed a small raft against the rock, with the rise and fall of every wave. He also saw that two long spars or fragments of a ship's mast had been fastened across two others so as to form a small square between them, and that a large bull's hide was securely stretched over this square, leaving the four ends of the timbers extending beyond it. He also saw the outline of a human form lying supinely upon the hide, and of a smaller figure, with its head resting upon the other, both covered over with a bright-hued woolen quilt.

The lad called loudly to his father, who was at work in an adjacent field, but at a considerable distance from him, and, as soon as he had caught his attention, Arius sprang down the bank to ascertain whether the persons so quietly lying upon the raft were still alive. The ends of the timbers projected far beyond the hide upon which they lay, and the boy found himself in deep water almost at his first step from the shore; but he had been accustomed to daily baths in the bay from childhood, and without fear or hesitation he boldly dashed in between the projecting timbers toward the hide on which the bodies lay. The noise he made in calling Ammonius, and in dashing through the water, roused up one of the sleepers on the raft, and she slightly raised her head, and with her hand threw back the woolen covering, and Arius saw the swarthy face of a young Egyptian girl of twelve turned upon him with wide-open, wondering eyes. The other form was that of a woman, but she neither spoke nor moved, and Arius thought she must be dead. But the girl did speak, and the boy thought she used the Egyptian tongue, although he could not understand her words. Then he said, "Maiden, canst thou speak in Greek."

A swift gleam of intelligence broke over the child's wan face, and she joyfully answered: "Yea! for in Alexandria Greek is the common speech of all, whether they be Romans, Egyptians, or Jews!"

"Art thou wet?"

"Yea," she said, "soaked in salt water for I know not how long; but I have slept soundly, and mamma has not even yet waked up."

"If thou art so thoroughly wet already, a little more water will not hurt thee; so put thine arms about my neck, hold fast, and I will carry thee to land."

"But mother!" she cried; and then becoming frightened that she did not awake, she kissed her passionately, saying: "Mamma! mother! wake up! We have drifted to the shore!"

Then the poor lady murmured words that neither of them could comprehend, but she made no attempt to move, and seemed to be talking unconsciously. Then Arius took the girl's hand in his, saying gently: "My father will soon be here, and together we can take thy mother from the raft. Come thou with me."

Then the girl raised herself up into a sitting posture, and Arius, holding to the spar with one hand, with the other drew her down into the sea beside him, saying: "Now put up thine arms and hold on tightly; it is but a few feet to the shore."

And the girl said, "I can swim as well as thou, but I am weary and cold and hungry, and will put one hand on thy shoulder." And when she had done so the boy went hand over hand along the spar, and drew himself and her rapidly shoreward, until his feet rested firmly upon the bottom, and then he caught the child up in his arms and lifted her up to the dry ground.

By this time, Ammonius, coming with all speed, had reached the bank above them, and at one swift, intelligent glance comprehended the scene in all its pitiful details; then he sprang down the bank beside them, and said unto Arius, "Doth the woman yet live?"

"Yea, father, she was talking even now; but I scarcely think she knew what things she said."

"Run thou unto the house swiftly, tell thy mother, and bring hither a saw."

And the boy sprang up the bank instantly and ran homeward. Then Ammonius spoke kindly to the girl, saying, "How farest thou, little maiden?"

And the child said: "I am well enough, but wet and hungry. But mamma is ill. Please bring her to the land."

"Yea, maiden; soon will my son return with a saw, wherewith I can saw off two of the timbers where they cross the other two, and so draw the raft up close to the land, and then lift thy mother gently and safely to the shore. Dost thou understand me, child?"

"Yea," she answered, "and I see that it is best to wait. But I want my mother; she is sick indeed."

Very soon the agile youth returned, bringing the saw with him, and Ammonius immediately swam out to the bull's hide, and sawed away two of the timbers at the intersection thereof, and quickly drew the raft close up against the shore, and took up the quilt and cast it to Arius, telling him to spread it out upon the ground, and in his strong arms lifted up the unconscious woman and bore her up the bank and gently laid her upon the quilt. Soon Arete and old Thopt joined them; and Arius and his mother took each an end of the quilt upon which the woman lay, and Ammonius gathered up the other two ends, and they bore her gently but swiftly to the cottage; and old Thopt took the girl's hand in hers and followed them as quickly as her growing infirmities permitted.

Arete and old Thopt stripped the poor lady of her elegant apparel that was soaked through with sea-water, and rubbed her vigorously with woolen cloths, clothed her with warm woolen gowns out of Arete's wardrobe, and gave her hot tea made of such shrubs as were known to their simple domestic pharmacy. The sufferer manifestly got much relief from this treatment, but it was only too apparent that the terrible exposure to which she had been subjected had taken hold upon the very roots of life in her beautiful but delicate frame. Her unconscious murmurs were uttered in the Egyptian tongue, and, no sooner had old Thopt heard it, than a strange excitement seized her, and she answered the lady in the same strange speech, crooning over her like a mother over a sick child, or more like some affectionate animal licking its wounded young; for the Egyptian speech evidently shows the syllabication into articulate sounds of thoughts that were primarily expressed in signs and grimaces--the translation of brute means of communication into words; and its original rudimentary form is as direct and unveiled in the expression of passion and emotion as the actions of an animal could be.

The maiden, Theckla, having been well rubbed, well clad in dry garments, and well fed with hot soup and viands, seemed almost free from any ill effects of her long exposure upon the raft; and, being assured that her mother was tenderly cared for, rapidly recovered her strength and spirits.

The famous medical school at Cyrene educated many men in all the learning of a profession which was then in its infancy, and so thoroughly infested with charlatanism that even the most eminent professors of the art of healing commanded but small respect among intelligent people; and the Christians especially had no faith in their pretended ability to cure disease. In ordinary cases they trusted to careful nursing, and the curative power of nature in people whose freedom from vice and whose simple, healthful manner of life gave the patient every chance of recovery, without the use of incantations, charms, and poisons, which then constituted the chief resources of professional pharmacy; and in desperate cases they anointed the stricken one with oil, obtained the prayers of the Church in his behalf, and calmly awaited the issue; having neither any inordinate love of life nor any distressful fear of death, and looking upon even a fatal issue of the illness as a change that was often better than recovery--a happy release from the cares and uncertainties of earthly life, that was neither to be too rashly sought for nor too anxiously avoided. Hence the women at the farm themselves assumed the care of their interesting patient, and gave her constant and affectionate attention, but no drugs except such simple remedies as were in common family use, of all of which old Thopt had a very thorough knowledge. The old woman believed that sound and refreshing sleep is the secret of health and longevity, and that no one would die so long as this blessing was obtainable; and hence, in her opinion, the poppy was a panacea. The bark of certain species of the willow she knew to be good against malarial fevers, and this was her favorite remedy in every disease which manifested a remittent or intermittent form. She had no hesitation in declaring that the lady would be ill a long time, and that whether she would live or die must depend upon the vital forces she had to draw upon; for old Thopt had always remained at least a semi-pagan, and, if there was any Christianity in her, it was inextricably tangled up with the remnants of the old religion which she had learned in her home upon the Nile. She loved her mistress passionately and devotedly, just as a faithful dog might have loved, and she refused to accept the freedom offered to her by Arete when, under the influence and instructions of Ammonius, that lady had become a Christian; because one of the fixed and immovable articles of her ancient creed was that many Egyptians were created to be slaves, and that she was one of them; so that it would have been a measureless impiety for her to set up herself to be free. If she had any hatred of the new religion, it grew out of the fact that that faith undertook to abolish the relation of mistress and slave between Arete and herself. She had not undressed and washed her patient without immediately perceiving that she was one of that aristocratic class who had come into the world to enjoy all of its advantages, and to be waited upon by slaves, as was demonstrated to old Thopt's satisfaction by the fineness of her kilt, girdle, and gown, and by the delicate pink-color of her flesh beneath it; and the old woman would as soon have thought of organizing a rebellion against Anubis, the jackal-headed god himself, as to have thought of withholding proper reverence and care from the superior being who had been cast upon her guardianship. So that the Christian charity of Arete and the inborn sense of duty and obligation which generations of inherited servitude had made second nature in old Thopt combined to secure faithful and untiring care in behalf of the sick woman, and one or the other of them was in attendance upon her day and night.

But as Ammonius had carried her from the raft to the land, and on the way up to the house, he had heard her utter unconsciously, in the Egyptian language, disjointed sentences which caused him much anxiety; and, as soon as her immediate wants had been attended to, he charged the family that they were not in any way to apprise the lady that she had fallen into the hands of Christians until such time as he might deem it proper to instruct them otherwise; but that they should be as diligent in their care of her as if she had been the sister of them all. Before the close of the first day's watching beside her patient, Arete found ample reason, in the lady's feverish revelations, for the injunctions which her husband had given concerning her. She talked almost incessantly: now of her home in Alexandria; now of the rulers of Egypt; now of her husband Amosis, and of her daughter; now of some special mission which Amosis had undertaken at Rome; now of the fearful tempest; now of a desperate struggle upon the raft between her husband and some one else, in which both had fallen into the sea together. The substance of this disjointed and feverish babbling left no doubt upon Arete's mind that the lady's husband was in the service of the rulers of Egypt, and high in the confidence of both the priests and of the government; nor that he was a bitter adversary of the Christians; nor that, when overtaken by the tempest, he was on his journey to Rome, to obtain from the Emperor larger authority to persecute the Christians, even to extermination, in Egypt and throughout Northern Libya. She gathered also that when the officer and his wife and child had betaken themselves to the raft as their last hope of safety, some one, seeing that all order and discipline were lost, inflamed by a guilty passion for the beautiful woman, had leaped upon the raft with them as it was leaving the vessel's side, and that a desperate struggle had occurred between the husband and the intruder, in which both had fallen into the sea; and that the lady herself regarded the very name of Christians with detestation and horror, and fully sympathized with her husband's purpose to persecute them; and she had expected him to reap great and rapid advancement from his zeal against the churches. And, although not unconscious of the element of danger lurking in their intercourse with such a conscientious hater of Christianity, Arete felt even larger compassion for her beautiful patient's pagan darkness than for her physical illness; but she fully realized the propriety of her husband's caution upon the subject.

And so the weary days went by, and on the sixth morning the fever broke, and left the poor lady with restored consciousness, but physically as weak and helpless as an infant.

During these days, Arius and Theckla had become fast friends. She was a beautiful child, but an Egyptian of the aristocratic class. Her hair, which was as black as jet, curled profusely all around and over her shapely head in luxuriant masses. Her forehead was low and broad, the face a perfect oval from the full temples to the point of the plump, delicate, projecting chin, while the small, full-lipped mouth was red as a cherry, the upper lip notably short and voluptuous. The black, arched, delicate eyebrows nearly met at the root of the high, straight, delicately chiseled nose, and the large, dark eyes, soft, black, and fathomless, free alike from fire and languishment, were of a kind found nowhere on earth except along the Nile--full, wide-open eyes that seemed calm and untroubled as the sightless orbs of any sphinx, yet full of mystery as is the old, old land of Kem. Arius soon discovered that the girl was remarkably bright and quick, but that she could neither read nor write, all the instruction she had ever received (and she had been very carefully taught) having been communicated by oral teaching. Her native tongue was, of course, that of Egypt, but she spoke Greek with fluency, and Latin also, but with difficulty and hesitation.

On the evening of the day on which she had been rescued from the waves, the boy and girl were playing and chatting together in the shade before the cottage. The sun was just sinking beyond the distant mountain-range, when the girl said, "Do you go at sunrise or at sunset?"

"Go whither?" said Arius.

"Why, to worship Mentu, or Atmu, of course! Do you not worship?"

"Worship whom?" asked Arius.

"Oh," she answered, "old Ea, or Ptah, or Hesiri-Hes, or the other gods, any of them you prefer?"

"I do not worship any of them," said Arius.

"Perhaps, then," said Theckla, "thou art an atheist, and hatest all of the gods; and that is very wrong. For papa says that the atheists are little better than the Christians themselves, and that it is owing to their evil influence that so many young people in Alexandria are growing up to believe in nothing. But, blessed be the gods, I have been brought up in religion!"

"And which of the gods dost thou love and worship most?"

"I love none of them surely, but I fear and worship Ptah, Ra, and Hesiri-Hes, the cross old things; because mamma says that they are the most respectable; and I fear them much, especially the terrible, implacable, pitiless Ma-t."

"But do you not think," said Arius, "that you would rather worship some loving, compassionate, and holy deity, whom you could love, and obey because you loved him?"

"Oh, that would be funny, would it not?--for a girl to fall in love with a god! I never thought of such a thing before, but I believe," she added, with an arch glance at Arius, "that I would like a really nice handsome boy better than any of the plebeian gods!"

"What dost thou mean, Theckla, by saying 'the plebeian gods'?"

"Oh, I mean the new-fangled deities that have come into fashion during the last two or three thousand years--the cheap, low-priced divinities worshiped by the slaves and by the mechanics, like Sebek, the crocodile-headed, and all that contemptible crowd. Mamma says that we--that is, the nobility, you know--ought not to pay any attention to any of them except the dreadful old gods, like Ra, Ptah, Hesiri-Hes, and the other ancient divinities; because our own family is older and more honorable than any of them except the high, dreadful old fellows that have lived forever. Still, boy, thou hadst better worship even the wretched Sebek than to be an atheist or a Christian; for papa says so."

Then the boy's heart yearned to tell the beautiful pagan of the God in whom he believed, but, remembering his father's caution on that subject, he chose rather to avoid further conversation of the kind, and started off toward the bay to take his evening bath.

"Whither goest thou?" asked the little maiden.

"I am going to the bay to take a bath, as I do daily."

"That will be fine sport," she cried, "and I am going with you!"

And Theckla sprang to her feet, and ran along beside him. The boy reached the water's edge, and, casting aside the loose gown habitually worn about the farm, he plunged into the bay and struck out from the shore, the play of his limbs being almost unimpeded by the close-fitting under-garment reaching from the neck to midway of the thigh; and instantly the young girl, whom old Thopt had arrayed in the short, sleeveless kilt and long gown which the women usually wore, threw off her outside gown and plunged in after him, exclaiming: "Oh, it is nicer than Lake Mareotis! But I have swum with papa from the great Pharos to the Kibotos in the little harbor of Eunostos!" and she swam after the boy as gracefully as a mermaid. Soon she caught up with him, and, having placed her little hands upon his head, she suddenly straightened out her arms with all her strength, and raising herself up with a lithe and joyous spring above him, with all her weight she plunged his head down far beneath the surface, and swam laughingly away. The boy came up instantly and pursued the fleeing maiden, and as soon as he could catch up with her, which was no easy task, he said, "Thou shalt go under too, Theckla!" but she was so excellent a swimmer, and so quick and active, that for a long time she baffled all his efforts to get her head beneath the waves. She laughed and struggled, and defied him, and exulted greatly that he was not able to give her such a ducking as she had given him, until, at last, he wound his long arms around her, pinioning both of hers, and, clasping her to his bosom, stood straight up, and they sank together until his feet touched the bottom, from which he sprang upward to the surface. Then the lad kissed her and released her, saying, "Wilt thou dip me again, Theckla, or hast thou had enough of it?"

But the girl clasped her hands above her head, threw herself suddenly downward, and for a moment her little feet flashed above the water as she dived, and instantly afterward she clasped the boy's legs in her arms and pulled him again beneath the surface, and rose above the waves before he had recovered himself. And so they sported in the calm waters of the bay until the twilight began to thicken over the valley, when they started for the shore, and the girl swam beside him as lightly as a gull, and, having thrown their long gowns around them, hand in hand they walked back to the cottage.

Theckla's first inquiry was of her mother, and, finding that she continued ill, she obstinately refused to leave her after it grew dark, even for a moment, but stretched herself out upon the couch beside her and slept until morning.

So it was every evening. During the day-time Arius was her favorite companion, but she seemed to have an unconquerable aversion to darkness, and would not leave her mother's side while it continued. Ammonius told them to let her have her own way, as terror of the dark hours was part of the old religion in which she had been raised.

CHAPTER VII.

THECKLA FINDS ONE GOD AND HEARETH OF ANOTHER.

So passed the days away, and Arius and Theckla became as firmly bound to each other as if they had been raised together all their little lives. On the second day after her coming, Arius had resumed his usual tasks in the garden and in the fields; and when he came home at noontide she seemed rejoiced to see him, and demanded with playful imperiousness, "Where hast thou been all the morning, Arius?"

"I have been at work in the garden," replied the boy.

"At work!" she exclaimed; "digging with thy hands? Why, thou art not a slave!"

And the boy answered, laughing merrily: "Nay, I call no man master; I am as free as any Cæsar!"

"Why, then, dost thou work? Verily, I thought that none but slaves and mechanics ever labor."

"But thou dost greatly err. It is true that some Greeks, Romans, and Jews, suppose that none ought to labor except those whom they call 'vile'; or rather they call all who labor 'vile,' but I do not accept their monstrous definitions, having been thoroughly taught that the only man who is free is he who lives by his labor without dependence upon relatives, or upon the offices which are distributed by the favoritism of the dissolute and wicked creatures whom they call emperors, Cæsars, proconsuls, and such titles; and I am free-born, and will maintain my liberty."

"Why, then, dost thou toil?"

"Because we need to toil in order to live comfortably and independently, as we are not rich, and do not desire to be so; but I never will be any man's servant. And, also, because it is noble and right to toil in some way, and every one who is not idiotic, deformed, or afflicted, is unfit to live unless he follows some honorable and useful vocation."

"Thou art the very nicest boy I know," she said, "but it seemeth so strange to me that thou shouldst labor with thy hands, and shouldst talk as if thou didst believe that it is good and not degrading to do so. I never heard such things. But I will go with thee this afternoon and see what thou doest."

"Thou mayst do so," said Arius, "and thou mayst help me with my work if thou wilt."

But the little maiden held up her hands that looked like delicate wax-work, and laughingly cried out, "Even with these hands?"

"Yea," said the boy, merrily, "even with those, tender and pretty as they are."

So after the midday meal, when Arius went back to the patch of onions at which he was at work, Theckla accompanied him, and stood awhile watching him as he dug up the tubers.

"What is to be done with these?" she asked.

"They are to be gathered up into little heaps, and carried hence to the house, and stored away until wanted."

"Why, I can pile them up for you," she cried, and straightway she began to gather the onions up as fast as the boy dug them, saying: "I wonder what mamma would think if she knew I was learning to work? But it is good, and I will help thee every day."

"Thou shalt not weary thyself," said the boy, "and thou shalt quit as soon as thou dost desire to do so."

But she would not stop, and continued at the task for several hours, until it was completed, seeming to be delighted with her newly discovered ability to be of use.

"What other work hast thou to do?"

"Nothing else, Theckla, except to take some salt to the cattle in the pasture, beyond the field, and thou mayst go into the house. I will not be long absent."

"But I will not go to the house, Arius; I will go with thee, and see the large-eyed beasts."

"Come on, then," said the boy, and, taking up the bag of salt which he had brought from the barn, he led the way along the shore of the little bay until they had passed beyond the field, where they came upon the edge of the pasture-land, and there Arius scattered the salt along a great trough of wood, to which some of the cattle had hurried up as soon as they saw the boy, and others came one after another, until more than a score were contentedly licking up the salt; and among them a fine bull-calf that was peculiarly marked. The kindly-treated herd were tame and fearless, and, as soon as young Theckla saw the bull, she gazed at him with the most intense interest, and ran up to the animal, crying out, excitedly: "Lo, the god! the god! the beautiful young Apis!"

"What dost thou mean now?" said Arius.

"Why, boy," she answered, joyously, "thou art the most fortunate boy that ever lived. Seest thou not the god--the sacred bull--the beautiful young Apis? Seest thou not the black-colored hide; the triangular white spot upon his forehead; the hairs on his back roughened out into the form of an eagle; the crescent white spot upon his right side? Oh, if he hath a knot under his tongue in the shape of a scarabæus, the sacred beetle of Ptah, he hath then all the marks that reveal the bull to be a god! Wilt thou not look under his tongue and see?"

The boy gazed upon her with mingled pity, amusement, and contempt. He had read and heard of the worship of idols and of beasts, but had never before witnessed an actual exhibition of such idolatry. "Why, Theckla," he answered, "the bull is no more a god than thou art a cow. I am amazed that so sensible a girl should be capable of such folly as to think this beast a god."

"But he is an Apis, Arius, and the priests of the temple at Memphis would give thee his weight in gold for him. They would come hither in a royal procession to carry him hence; they would keep him for forty days at Nilopolis, and for forty days at Memphis, and the noblest of the women in the city would go in naked and worship him; and he would be fed like a great king as long as he lives, and when he dies he would become an Osor-hapi, a great god, and would secure thy soul. Surely the priests must know that he is a great god, or they would not build such grand temples in honor of Apis, and worship him with such magnificent and costly ceremonies and processions. I verily fear that thou art an atheist, Arius, but I have been raised up to be religious, and I know."

"Theckla," answered the boy, "I can take a goad in my hand and drive this sort of a god whithersoever I will; I can catch his tail in my hands and twist it until he shall bellow with pain. If thou wilt hold out to him an ear of corn in thine hand, he will follow thee about like a dog; and thou callest the beast a god! Theckla, I am verily ashamed of thy foolishness."

But the young girl looked gravely at her companion, and said in tones of solemn warning and reproof: "Arius, thou dost not believe in Ea, Ptah, Shu, Seb, Set, Mentu, Atmu, nor in Hesiri-Hes; and thou dost laugh at the sacred Hathors, and thou dost mock the bull-god Apis!--Boy, dost thou believe in anything? Or art thou an atheist?"

"Yea," cried Arius, laughing, "I believe thou art the brightest and the prettiest little pagan in the world; and some time I shall explain to thee what I believe, and convince thee of the folly of thy polytheistic and idolatrous notions. But not now, for thy god and the other beasts with him have salt enough, and we must return home."

They went back along the bay-shore, and the sun was nigh the tops of the distant mountains; and Arius, walking a little in advance of Theckla, heard a sudden plunge into the water, and looking back he saw the little maiden swimming boldly out into the bay, and immediately he plunged in after her. They swam, dived, raced, scuffled, and sported in the pure and healthful element until twilight began to gather over the lowlands, and then, hand in hand, they wandered back to the cottage, Theckla going immediately to her mother's apartment, whose side she would not leave so long as the night lasted--a horror of darkness being incident to the Egyptian religion, derived, perhaps, from the grand midnight ceremonies of the Memphian priests in which annually with torches and processions, and weird and impressive wailings, they celebrated the world-wide search of Isis for the dismembered body of the consort whose mangled limbs the hatred of the evil Seth had scattered about the earth.

Theckla wanted to tell her mother about the wonderful young Apis, but old Thopt peremptorily enjoined silence upon her, and forbade the sick lady to talk in her present excessively debilitated condition. For it was manifest that her recovery was exceedingly doubtful, and that even the slightest excitement or effort might be fatal to her. She lay quietly enough, and while she recognized Theckla, and seemed to understand the few Egyptian words spoken to her by Arete and old Thopt, which were carefully limited to repeating to her that she had been very ill, and must remain entirely quiet, and neither talk nor even think, she seemed almost to have forgotten the shipwreck and the loss of her husband; and the two women who watched her devotedly even doubted whether she knew that she was away from home. They looked forward with great anxiety to the time when she might grow strong enough to shake off this healthful lassitude of extreme exhaustion, and realize her unhappy circumstances. But the recent past seemed to have been blotted out of her memory, and she lay quiet and uncomplaining, apparently content with her surroundings; and the anxious nurses carefully avoided everything that could even by chance arouse her drowsy intelligence, and renew the consciousness of grief that seemed to slumber in her brain.

The Sabbath-day came round again, and, with the rising of the sun, young Theckla bounded out of her mother's room, calling aloud for Arius. It was usual on the Sabbath for the family at Baucalis to go to some house of a Christian in the vicinity, where would be gathered together a small assemblage of the faithful for religious services, or to have the neighbors assemble at the farm for the same purpose. On this day, however, Arete and old Thopt would be necessarily detained at home by the illness of the Egyptian Hatasa; and Ammonius, who still thought it prudent, both upon her account and upon his own, not to inform her that she was enjoying the hospitality of a family belonging to the hated sect that was everywhere spoken against, and that was persecuted throughout Libya even more bitterly than elsewhere in the Roman Empire, ordered that Arius should take charge of Theckla for the day, and determined himself to go to the assembly, in order to consult certain of the brethren about his future course in reference to his involuntary guests. Arius then informed his father about the singular recluse he had met with upon the mountain on the preceding Sabbath, of his promise to visit him upon that day, and asked his permission to go, saying that he would take Theckla with him if his father had no objection to suggest, and would invite the singular and learned old man to visit them. To this Ammonius readily gave his consent, and Arius thereupon told Theckla of the facts, and invited her to accompany him, to which she enthusiastically assented. The farm vineyard produced a wine almost identical with the famous Mareotic, which was praised from the mouth of the Nile to Athens and to Rome. It also produced figs, pomegranates, apricots, peaches, oranges, citrons, lemons, limes, and bananas, which the Christians commonly called the "fruits of paradise," because in that latitude they were in season the whole year through. It also produced various melons, among them a delicious watermelon, yellow on the inside, lotus, and olives. In their garden, also, grew the rose, the jasmine, the lily, the oleander, chrysanthemums, geraniums, dahlias, helianthus, and violets, and they could raise almost every vegetable known to both tropical and temperate zones.

Arius procured a basket, and enlisted the services of old Thopt by telling her that he was about to visit an ancient Egyptian hermit who dwelt alone upon the mountain, and desired to take him a lot of good things to comfort his loneliness; and that kind-hearted creature soon had a few bottles of excellent wine, some bread-loaves of finest flour, and quite an assortment of choice fruits, both preserved and fresh, packed into the basket, the whole crowned with a beautiful bouquet plucked by Theckla's dainty fingers. Arius, bearing his basket, and followed by the agile girl, pursued his way along the little bay until he had passed by it westwardly, and then began the long but gradual ascent of the mountain, upon a small plateau of which dwelt the aged eremite. In less than two hours they had reached the plateau in front of the hermitage, and soon beheld the ancient seated near his own door, his weary eyes gazing far away over the brilliant expanse of the Mediterranean. The approach of the two young people caught his attention, and with a genial smile the old man welcomed them. Taking the girl's hand in his own, he murmured: "She is a bright and lovely child, and a true daughter of Kem" (the Black-land). He spoke in the Egyptian language, which he knew Arius did not understand, but the girl answered in the same tongue: "Yea, father, I am from To-mehit" (the North-land), "and was born in Alexandria."

Then the ancient said with surprise: "How is it that thou speakest Egyptian, when thy brother knoweth no word of the strange old language? Or is he thy brother?"

This he said in Greek, and Arius answered, "Nay, she is not my sister, but is a guest in my father's house."

Then he succinctly narrated the story of the rescue of Theckla and her mother from the raft. The old man listened with much interest to the boy's graphic recital; and then, turning to Theckla, he said: "Child, art thou, too, a Christian like thy friend Arius; or art thou still in bondage to the false and fearful gods of Kem?"

Then the girl showed in her speaking face her loathing and abhorrence for the very name of Christ, and turning hastily to Arius she cried: "Art thou, then, a Christian? Belongest thou to that accursed and criminal association? Oh, say it is not so, or I will never, never love thee any more!"

But the boy drew himself up proudly and answered: "Yea, Theckla, I am a Christian, thank the boundless mercy of God! And, when thou shalt have learned what it is to be a Christian, I trust that thou wilt follow Jesus thyself, and love me and all other Christians more and more. For verily we are not such a people as thou hast been taught to believe us to be, any more than our bull is a god, as thou didst suppose."

"I do not very much believe in Apis," she said, "but the common people do. Ah! Arius, I am so sorry to hear this thing of thee! Why, if my mother had known that ye were Christians, she would sooner have died upon the raft than have gone into thy father's house, or to have suffered any one of you to touch her with your hands. Oh, I am so vexed to find that thou art connected with such a people!"

Then said Arius: "Thy mother is well cared for; and thou must let her know nothing until she hath become stronger; thou wouldst only distress her by informing her of the fact of our being Christians, and it could do no good to tell her."

Then the girl drew nigh to him with tearful eyes, and crossed her little hands upon his shoulder, and leaned her head against them, and, looking up into his eyes with sorrow and tenderness, said: "Ye have been so good and kind to both of us, that I can not help loving all the people at thy home, and I do love thee, although thou art a Christian; but it is a terrible thing; for papa says that to be a Christian is worse than to be an atheist."

These things all occurred in a moment, and the ancient, seeing that it had not been the purpose of Arius to inform the maiden concerning his religion, and that he himself had unwittingly brought about the disclosure of the fact, said unto them: "Come within and be seated, my children; I desire to talk to both of you."

And, when they had gone within, Arius set his basket upon the old man's table, saying: "I have brought unto thee wine, bread, and fruits, as a token of my reverence for thine age and learning. I desire to be friendly with thee."

The old man seemed to be much touched by the boy's speech and manner, and gently answered: "I thank thee, truly, and far more for thy kind words than for any gifts. Not often do the ancient enjoy the friendship of the young, although nothing else on earth can be more pleasant unto them."

"But the heart of a Christian needeth renewal," said Arius, "if it be not always both young enough to sympathize with the youngest, and old enough to sympathize with even the very oldest. The very core of our religion is the Agape, a love which is not measured by age nor accident, but goeth out freely to every one that needeth it."

The old man looked upon the boy with wonder, saying: "That is beautiful, indeed; there is no such truth in any other religion."

And the girl said, "That is good and strong, Arius, although it be a Christian dogma."

Then the ancient said: "I desire that ye will listen to me carefully for a moment, and thou especially, Theckla. Children, I am nigh upon fourscore years of age. My name is Am-nem-hat. In mine infancy I was placed in the great temple at Thebes, and dedicated to the service of Amen-Ba, Mut, and Kuhns, the Theban triad. My family was ancient and honorable in Egypt, and their influence and wealth opened the way for me to all priestly honors and learning. I remained in that temple fifty years, during twenty-five of which I was a priest, and I gradually mastered all the wisdom, learning, and mysteries of the priesthood, until my fellows determined that I should be elevated to the highest rank in the sacerdotal service, and I was ordained and inaugurated to be high-priest at Ombos, where I continued for five-and-twenty years longer. The triad which throughout all Egypt is worshiped as Hesiri-Hes, and Horus, we at Thebes worshiped as Amen-Ra, Mut, and Kuhns, and at Ombos as Ptah-Pukht and Imhotep. But, while during all these years I exercised the functions and exhausted the learning of the priesthood, I forever sought after Ma-t, the Goddess of Truth, she that in her own hall, in the lower world, is called Two Truths, by whom the dead are judged.--Dost thou know something of the fearful Ma-t, young Theckla?"

"Yea," answered the girl, with a perceptible shudder, "I know her well, and tremble at the dreadful thought of her! So wise! so hard and pitiless! so tearless, and yet so just! The terrible Ma-t, without mercy, incapable of love, unmoved by hate, implacable, emotionless, the fearful judge, the Truth!"

"Then listen to me, child! I worshiped through all these lonely years as a faithful, conscientious priest, and memorized the book of the dead, and studied the mysteries of medicine, of astronomy, and of mathematics, and sought unceasingly to know the awful Ma-t! Dost thou think that I am one who ought to know whether any of the gods of Kem are true or false?"

Then Theckla fell upon her knees before the ancient priest, and lifting her little hands to him she cried: "Yea, father, thou knowest! Ancient, honorable, learned priest, thou knowest! Teach thou Arius to believe in the three great gods, to seek the awful Ma-t, and to abandon the pernicious Christian faith, for thou art wise! thou knowest all the truth!"

"Listen then, Theckla. Five years ago, driven by the quenchless curiosity of an unsatisfied but earnest soul, I caused to be brought before me one who preached to men of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, because I had heard that these Christians were irreclaimable from the errors of their superstition, and I desired to test the question whether they could be persuaded to return unto the old religion. I kept him with me many days, while we discussed these things, and then sent him from me unconvinced. And afterward I fled from the temple secretly, in an open boat, in which I had placed my most valuable possessions, and floated down the Nile. Thence I wandered along the coast to Alexandria, where, for a great sum, secretly I purchased all the sacred writings of the Jews and Christians, and, after many days more of wandering along the coast, I found this spot and have since then dwelt here alone, still seeking for the truth. For--art thou listening to me, Theckla?--a horror of great darkness had fallen upon my soul. I know that Amen-Ra, Mut, and Kuhns, are not true gods! Apis is nothing but a bull; Anubis is only a jackal; Sebek is a crocodile and nothing more; and even the most ancient gods, if there be any truth in them at all, are only the visible emblems of some higher truth which the very priests have forgotten, if, indeed, they ever knew it. I have hoped and half expected to find that this unknown truth, this 'hidden' thing which is not Hapi, might be that which the Christians promulgate; but this I do not know. Nevertheless, my child, I tell thee that the gods of Kem are no true gods; and I counsel thee to learn of Arius that which he believeth! For falsehood is not profitable; and I realize that all my days have been consumed in learning and in teaching only errors; and it is sad and terrible."

Both of them heard the old man's confession with awe and sympathy, and when, overcome by strong emotion, he had ceased to speak, Theckla gave way to a passionate burst of tears; but, as soon as she could regain her self-control, she turned to the ancient and with strange earnestness exclaimed, "O Father Am-nem-hat, high and honorable priest, hast thou, too, become a Christian?"

"Nay," replied the old man solemnly, "I have only learned the bitter lesson that the gods of Egypt are all false: I have not found a true God yet, if any such there be."

"Thou shalt yet find him," cried Arius, "to the joy and consolation of thy spirit, and thine old age shall be filled with the peace of God that passeth all understanding; for he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh shall it be opened."

Then they were all silent for a time. Then some of the kids came up to the door, and Theckla, oppressed with the sadness and solemnity of the last few minutes, sprang up, crying out: "O the pretty, happy kids! May I go out and play with them?"

And the old man, with a pleasant smile, answered, "Yea, my child, if thou wilt not leave the plateau."

And Theckla bounded out of the house, and was soon engaged in a lively romp with the sportive young goats.

CHAPTER VIII.

WHO IS HAPI?

The absence of Theckla gave Arius the opportunity he desired to call out from Am-nem-hat a fuller expression of certain theological ideas suggested by the ancient during their first conversation, the remembrance of which had been the subject of frequent meditation ever since; and the boy said: "Since I last saw thee, Father Am-nem-hat, many circumstances have combined to prevent me from giving to the things which I heard from thee that careful consideration which I desired to bestow upon them; yet I have pondered much upon those philosophic views which thou didst utter concerning the dualism of God. I desire to hear more fully thereof; for although I know that Christianity is, for the most part, a practical, experimental thing, concerning the heart and the life of a man rather than a philosophical or theological system, concerning which Jesus himself had naught to say, as if he preferred to leave dogmas and ceremonies to the Scribes and Pharisees, so that it is possible for one to be a genuine and faithful Christian with little knowledge of philosophy or of science, yet it behooves the young especially to seek for information concerning every question that can arise out of the faith."

"Thou must understand," said Am-nem-hat, "that I do not assume to be a teacher of thy religion. Being set free from the bondage of Egyptology, and left, as it were, without any religion for the last five years, I have given much time and study to Christianity, reading the Scriptures, of course, by the light of all that I have learned of other systems, and seeking only to discover the truth. There is one thing, which I had long supposed to be true, which recent thought and investigation seem to establish beyond any great room for doubt. That thing is the fact that the old Egyptians believed the human spirit to be of divine origin, engaged throughout earthly life in a warfare between good and evil, and that its final state was determined after death by a solemn judgment rendered according to the deeds done in the body. This warfare continued through all the dynasties alike until during the eighteenth dynasty, the priesthood, fearing that the principle, or god of evil, was about to triumph, got together and obtained a royal decree, ratified by the sacerdotal order, to banish Seth (the evil god) out of Egypt, and out of the religion of Kem; but this action failed to have that salutary influence which had been expected from it. The fact itself was, perhaps, the most singular one in Egyptian history; but our sacred records leave no doubt that the royal and sacerdotal authorities united in a solemn decree for the banishment of Seth, in order to secure the future safety of the human soul. I have just as little doubt that originally they believed in one supreme God, who was conceived of as a dual being, combining in himself both the poles of spiritual sex-hood perfectly, and giving birth to a third divinity, by which the triad, that is constantly repeated under different names, was made complete. Hence I declared to thee that nothing could save the Christian faith from the imputation of polytheism except the assumption that the God of the Christians, like the original myth of all primitive faith, hath in himself a double spiritual sex-hood, of which Christ is the Son, 'begotten,' not created; 'conceived,' not made; divine, because as the son of man is human, the Son of God must be divine. If this is not true, then the Christ of these Scriptures, no matter how pure and exalted he may have been, was either a created being, or else he was only a mere appearance, a mere simulacrum of Deity, a pious fraud, who merely seemed to live among men, and to die for their justification, but did not do so in reality."

The old man paused at this point, but the boy, keeping steadily in view the matter which had aroused his own interest in the conversation, said, "But are there any proofs of the divine dualism and trilogy of which thou hast so confidently spoken?"

"I think so," said the ancient, "but the original idea has been overlaid and hidden for countless centuries by the myths and symbolisms and external ceremonies devised by ancient priests to express them for the common people, until the priests themselves perhaps only dimly perceived the original truth, and regarded the symbolism itself as true--a most bare and flagrant idolatry. For when, at some indefinite yet very remote period, religion became blended with government and the priests sought rather to control public affairs than to maintain a true worship, the religious idea became so degraded that the sun, which was originally only the symbol of a higher, unseen God, was mistaken for a God itself, and worshiped as such; and this degradation increased with ages, until finally any one who could build a sculptured sarcophagus, and pay for the embalming processes, ritualistic prayers, incantations, charms, and ceremonies, was declared to be in Hesiri justified. According to the inscriptions on the sepulchres, no rich man was damned, and respectability on earth and salvation after death were dependent upon money alone. There was nothing to be done in the way of restraining one's self from evil, nothing to be done in the way of active benevolence. The chief business of an Egyptian's life was to acquire sufficient wealth to build a costly tomb, and the most expensive event in a man's experience was his funeral. Hence the rich were all saved, and the poor were mostly condemned, without regard to personal character and action. Yet all the while the most pious and learned of the priests clearly perceived, even through the mists of error, superstition, and selfishness, which debased the ancient faith, the primitive truth that God was one--a dual being that was to become a triad by the generation of a Son."

"I think," said Arius, "that I comprehend the argument; yet I desire to hear the proofs of this divine dualism more explicitly stated."

"The proofs thereof, derived from the dualism in the original faith of the most ancient races (as the Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese), and from the fact that the monotheist Manes, or Moses, called his one God by a name which is the dual or plural number of a Hebrew noun, have already been suggested to you. But, in the ancient religion of Egypt, this dualism pervaded the whole system everywhere. There was even a dual name for everything--the one common, the other sacred or hieratic. The ancient name of Egypt, 'Kem,' signified both the 'Black-land' and also the 'black man' or people. The local name, Mizraim, was a dual word, signifying both upper and lower Egypt, in which 'To-mehit' was the north-land, and 'To-res,' the south-land, and the sacred name of the river, which the Greeks call the Nile, was 'Hapi'; and the same word was applied to Apis, the bull-god; and in both cases the word was used to denote 'the hidden,' 'the concealed,' the source of the Nile being believed to be undiscoverable, and the being of whom Apis was originally the symbol being yet 'hidden,' 'unrevealed.' No matter where, or by what name, the one supreme, self-existent, self-productive Creator of all things was worshiped, he was originally worshiped as a dual entity, a double god, at once father and mother of a third manifestation that was always a son. Primarily Apis, 'the hidden,' 'the concealed,' simply meant that this third person was yet unrevealed; but just as Ra (the sun), originally the symbol of the one God, became substituted for God himself, afterward Apis becomes the real 'hidden' thing, of which he was primarily only a symbol, and his spiritual form seems to have become Horus. Yet Ra is rarely associated with a female consort; but, when he is so, it is always with a female Ra, and never with an inferior being. But, even after this idolatry became established, the higher priests preserved the original idea of a dual god, to be made a triad by the generation of a son; and everywhere in Egypt, no matter by what local names their gods were called, this trilogy was affirmed in every temple. The very essence of the ancient Egyptology, therefore, is the idea of one dual god, that becomes a trilogy by the generation of a son. The same thing is true of the most ancient form of the Indian and Chinese polytheisms. Thou must perceive, therefore, that in the original faith of all the primitive nations, the divine being is Father-mother, which is one dual God, and a son. If, therefore, the Christian religion presents the idea of a spiritual dualism made a trilogy by the generation of a son, it maintains the very idea of the Deity, which is the core of all the primitive religions--Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and, I think, Jewish also."

"If thou art not weary," said Arius, "I would desire much to hear thee declare how these views, which are entirely new to me, agree with thy reading of our sacred books."

"I will cheerfully state the result of my investigations," said the ancient, "again reminding thee that I read them only as I have done the sacred books of every other people known to me, and not as one having any especial authority to declare the meaning thereof."

"I know perfectly well as to that," said the boy, "but desire to know what thou hast found therein in reference to this opinion of thine."

"I have found first, as I have already suggested, that Moses, who was a monotheist, and a bitter enemy of all polytheistic ideas, constantly uses the plural number of a Hebrew noun to name the one God in whom he believed. According to the prophetic portions of the Jewish scriptures, I find that the Son of God was to be born of a virgin, and the trilogy was to be manifested to man by the incarnation of this son. Now, in the sacred books of the Christians, the four called Gospels, Christ is always called the Son of God, and Jesus is called Christ. Uniformly that which stands in the same relation to God that was attributed to the earthly manifestation of the divine nature by all original faiths is the Christ; that which in the Christian system occupies the same relation to the divine nature which was borne by the feminine side of the dual God of all the original faiths is called the Holy Ghost. This expression (Holy Ghost) occurs two hundred and twelve times in the New Testament, and in every instance the words are in the Greek neuter gender, which expresses nothing as to sex. The common declaration concerning Christ is that he was 'begotten' of God: a man is begotten of his father; he was 'conceived' of the Holy Ghost: a man is conceived of his mother. My interpretation, therefore, must be that these scriptures teach us that the one God is a divine dualism, a double spiritual Being, the Father-Ghost, and that the Christian trilogy is completed by the generation of a son of this Father-Ghost which is one double God; and that as far as sex-hood can be predicated of a spiritual nature, Christ, the Son, is a spirit begotten and conceived of God his Father-Mother, by whom the worlds were made, and who was afterward manifested in the flesh by assuming human nature. This is what thy scriptures teach me: I know not whether it be true; but it is a glorious statement of that which was the original faith of all primitive peoples before mankind lapsed into idolatry; for every high-priest in Egypt assuredly knoweth that polytheism was not the first faith of men."

"But," said Arius, "is not the Holy Ghost called 'he' in the paragraph from John which readeth--'And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that HE may abide with you forever; the Spirit of truth; whom the world can not receive, because it seeth HIM not, neither knoweth HIM: but ye know HIM, for HE dwelleth with you and shall be in you'; and in that passage which readeth as follows: 'But the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, HE shall teach you all things': and do not these readings conflict with your idea that the name of the third person in the Christian triad expresses nothing as to sex?"

"I think not so," answered the ancient, "because it is evident that in these places the only thing that can be meant by the 'Holy Ghost' and the 'Spirit of truth' is the Paraclete, the Comforter; and while the Greek word for comforter is a noun of the masculine gender, the words 'Holy Ghost' and 'Spirit of truth' still retain their neuter form, although put in apposition with it; and the pronouns 'he' and 'him' take their masculine form from the word comforter, and not from the words Holy Ghost and Spirit, which are always neuter, and express nothing as to sex. Besides this, I do not find anywhere in the scriptures any characteristics which are essentially masculine ascribed to the Holy Ghost, and I do find many which are essentially feminine."

"Wilt thou state any other argument, if there be any, that maintaineth this grand idea of a dual God that becometh a triad by the generation of a son?"

"There is another," said the ancient, "which is conclusive to my mind that the doctrine of thy scriptures is as I have stated it. In Genesis it is written that God said, 'Let us make man in our own image'; and, also, it is written, 'Male and female created he them.' It seemeth to me that this 'image' and 'likeness' hath a deeper signification than the mere similitude of man's character to that of God can convey. God is a spirit, according to these scriptures, and no resemblance can be imagined between human beings and him in regard to physical constitution. So far as the characters constituted the 'image and likeness,' the books show that it would include only the first man on one side, and God the Father on the other. But the words are generic: 'us' and 'our' the triad, on one side, and 'man' (that is 'male and female,' the human race) on the other, and I suppose the 'image and likeness' spoken of is one found in the essential nature of man, in his constitution and relations. For as in heaven, so in earth; in both, the trilogy includes Father, Mother, Son: trinity is family; and the essential point of the image and likeness between the human and the divine subsists in the fact that human nature necessarily exists as a triad--father, mother, son; just as the divine nature must do. This seemeth to me to be the only ground from which it is possible to predicate divinity of Jesus Christ without involving the whole Christian system in the mazes of polytheism; for if he be divine otherwise than in this fact of generation, there must be more than one God. In strict accordance with this view, I have observed that in those nations which are ignorant of this feminine aspect of the dual god, wives are degraded--are mere chattels, mere slaves; in others, that (like Egypt) recognize the divine feminine nature, but hold that she is inferior to the masculine element of this dualism, wives are tolerated, are not shut up in seclusion, are not mere slaves and chattels; while among the Christians alone who hold the absolute equality of Father and Spirit, womanhood is glorified and made honorable; and Jesus himself elevated marriage almost, if not altogether, into a religious sacrament."

"The views you present seem very like the truth," said the boy, musingly, "and they are certainly grand enough to be true. But they are entirely new to me, and I shall not fail to give them such study and meditation as my sense of the magnitude of the subject involved may demand. I have never heard any discussion upon the nature of the relation of the three persons of our Christian trilogy."

"I think," said the ancient, "thou wilt find that it is a mere mistake to suppose that there are three, for the sacred books teach me that there are only two, the Father-Ghost, or double God, but one only; and the Son of this one God. The perfectest flowers in nature are hermaphrodites."

"But wilt thou inform me whether any perfect, self-producing creature, possessed of animal life, hath ever been discovered?"

"Never," answered the ancient. "The partial realization of such a condition, the rare approximations thereto, which have been curiously noted by Egyptian priests for centuries and myriads of years, have been universally regarded as a deformity, and not as a perfection. Yet the priesthood say that the fact was perfectly realized, according to Moses, in the case of the first man; for the first woman was not created as the man was, but proceeded out of him; and the account given by Moses afterward means just that. I could say many things upon this matter indeed, but for the fact that the oath of secrecy, taken at every step of his progress in the sacerdotal life by every Egyptian priest, was vast and solemn; intended to cover his whole future life, and secure his silence under every possible mutation of his own fortune. The sphinxes, with wide-open eyes and sealed lips, and faces that are inscrutable and calm, revealing nothing that might show a trace of any passion, emotion, thought, or purpose, and yet full of intelligence and power, are the perfect symbol of the Egyptian priesthood; and I know not just how far these obligations are binding upon me."

"I will not question thee," said Arius, "but will endeavor to profit by whatever thou mayst be at liberty to declare."

"Thou mayst some day find use for the fact that was well known to the priesthood, who were the repository of all knowledge in the land of Kem, that in the embryonic or total life, both in animals and in man, there is absolutely no distinction of sex. Up to a short period prior to its birth, it is impossible to determine whether the offspring will be male or female--from which fact it seems to follow that sex is not a primary or essential function of animal existence, but dependent upon conditions during gestation which centuries of investigation have failed to disclose. Dost thou remember how bitterly the sacred books of the Israelites, from Moses down, denounce Baal, and Ashtaroth, and the star-god Remphan, and all the secret rites of the national religions of all other people except their own, the Egyptians included? Hast thou observed that many of the ceremonies which other nations practiced as part of religion are denounced by Moses as crimes punishable with death? Hast thou observed that throughout the Jewish scriptures, and especially throughout the Pentateuch, there are bitter and vindictive laws and customs devised for the express purpose of segregating the Israelites from all other peoples, for building up, as it were, a wall of partition between them and all other nations--and this, notwithstanding the fact that it would have been natural and right for Moses and his people, if they believed themselves to be in possession of the truth, to seek to impart that truth to others, and so procure the universal acceptance thereof? Hast thou marked the fact that the missionary spirit, which was the glory of every other religion, so as to create continual wars undertaken for the sole purpose of forcing other peoples to adopt the religion of the conqueror, was constantly repressed by the Jewish laws and branded as a crime? And hast thou ever reflected upon the real signification of these facts?"

"Yea," answered Arius, "and I have been taught that God, by Moses, so commanded the Jews in order to preserve the peculiar people from being seduced into following after strange gods, and adopting the idolatries which were everywhere believed in. For the idolatries thou hast named, and every false religion which had for its symbol a moon, a cow, a cock, or any symbol intended to indicate the fecundity of Nature, was only the worship of that very mystery of sex of which thou hast spoken such strange things, the deification of lasciviousness, the apotheosis of sensualism."

"They finally became so, indeed," said Am-nem-hat, sadly, "when the original truth became thoroughly corrupted; but it was not so in the beginning. For if thou wilt keep in mind the fact that the original faith of every primitive nation held the true God to be a dualism that was to become a triad by the generation of a Son; if thou wilt remember that this Son was also held to be Hapi, 'the hidden,' 'the concealed,' 'the unrevealed,' even as unto this day the high-priest of every temple in Egypt will declare unto thee; and, considering these things, thou wilt not surely say that the grand roll of Egyptian priests, stretching back for more than thirty centuries of recorded history from this age of ours, were all mere sensualists. On the contrary, thou wilt see in these singular rites and ceremonies, even in their present degraded form, the signs and symbols of a deathless longing in the hearts of that grand, pure, holy race of sacred priests, and of a search prosecuted over land and sea, through heaven, and earth, and hell, during all the fruitless and slow-gliding centuries, by every art, science, and resource known to men--a longing and a search after Hapi, 'the hidden one,' 'the concealed Son,' 'the unrevealed Saviour,' for whom the whole creation groaneth--a sublime spectacle, sad and grand enough to move a god to pity! For while the crowd see only a splendid pageant in that annual festival in which, with torches and with magnificent display, the priests and the whole population at Memphis wander over the city, the river, and the lake, seeking in earth, and fire, and water, for the dismembered body of the dual god, thou wilt find among them aged, pure, sad, learned men, who see in the same grand spectacle the perpetual memorial of their world-old search for Hapi, 'the concealed'; and, if thou couldst gaze into their shut, silent, sorrowful hearts, thou wouldst see all the faculties of soul and spirit exhaling in a yearning prayer that he might come! and at the gate of every temple thou wouldst find the priestly symbol, the Sphinx, the sleepless watcher, cut out of imperishable stone, 'gazing right on with calm, eternal eyes,' till Hapi come!--for such is the true signification of Hesiri-Hes, whom the Greeks call Osiris-Isis! And even in the later and more degraded worship of the bull-god Apis, while the common crowd see only the apotheosis of sensualism, as thou hast called it, in the fact that, when a new Apis is discovered, devout women at Memphis, during forty days, expose themselves stripped naked to the gaze of the sacred brute, the sad-faced priests realize that the endless and unavailing search to discover Hapi, 'the concealed,' had sometimes been prosecuted by unlawful means, against which Moses, in the Jewish scriptures, denounced the penalty of death. And the period of forty days was purposely chosen in order to cover by a few days, in both directions, a lunation of the moon; for the worship of the moon-god universally connected the lunations of that planet with the sexhood of women. But thou wouldst greatly err if thou shouldst believe that in its original, undegraded form, this worship was sensualism; for it began with some new effort to wring out of the mystery of sex the secret of Hapi, 'the concealed'; and was glorified by the fact that it was part and parcel of the weary, world-old search after him! Oh, will he ever come?"

Then the boy sprang to his feet, to the very tips of his toes, his right hand vibrating, his head erected and bent forward, his dark eyes gleaming with mesmeric light, his whole form and face glowing with passionate and quivering emotion, and he cried aloud: "Thou art pious and aged and learned! Thou teachest me much! But I will also teach thee something! As surely as thou livest, Hapi, the Hidden, whom thou callest the desire of all nations, hath already come in the flesh, and his name is Jesus Christ."

"Perhaps so, perhaps so," said the ancient, mournfully. "But the priests of Kem, during the past three thousand years, often imagined that they had found him, and as often met with bitter disappointment. The Sphinx still watches with unwinking gaze for the solution of the mighty problem, and the old are difficult to convince."

But at that moment Theckla burst in upon them, flushed and weary with her romping with the goats, crying out, "O sacred Hapi, I am so hungry and so tired!" Then the old man spread out a linen cloth upon the table, and, at his desire, Arius and Theckla placed thereon the table-ware and the dainties taken from the basket which the boy had brought, while he took from a little spring nigh his hermitage a jar of cool, refreshing goat's milk: and they three did feast right joyously.

CHAPTER IX.

THE DEMOCRACY OF FAITH.

It was indeed a singular thing to hear, the usual conversation of those young people about religious questions upon which the greatest minds of subsequent ages have spent their force without exhausting them; but it should be remembered that everything like exact science was then in its infancy: all that was actually known of medicine, chemistry, geology, geometry, geography, botany, and even of mathematics, could be very quickly learned; and around this narrow limit of ascertained truth spread a boundless wilderness of vagrant speculation, in which the seeker after learning might wander a whole lifetime without ever being able to add one single valuable fact to the stock of knowledge; so that religion, whether Christianity or paganism, was universally regarded as the one thing that might most profitably be learned and known; and education, even from infancy, consisted in acquiring the knowledge of it: and this education was among the heathen chiefly objective, handling the visible, tangible symbols of a superstition which possessed only the most meager elements of subjective truth and power, except, perhaps, for the higher priests who had been initiated into mysteries unknown to the common people; while among the Christians the process was almost reversed. Christianity had no objective life, except in the person of Jesus Christ; and the subjective power which it possessed upon both intellect and consciousness had no assignable limits, inasmuch as it seemed to make the martyrs almost insensible to physical pain, and yet could produce a moral sensitiveness so acute that to be conscious of willful deception might work the death of the body, as in the case of Ananias and Sapphira when they lied to Peter about the consecration of their property to holy uses. This education among the Egyptians, especially among females of the higher classes, was chiefly oral, but among the Christians the young were taught both orally and by the written text.

One of the strangest and yet most logical results of the Christian teachings and practice (and one which has been, for very sufficient reasons, ignored by the theologians) was to develop a radical and uncompromising spirit of democracy throughout the Christian communities or churches. The early Christians uniformly held that they, as Christians, belonged to a kingdom which was in, but not of, the world--a kingdom for which no earthly potentate had right or power to legislate; and this living faith loosened the bond of allegiance and dissolved the sense of obligation as to all human authority, and was the negation of the lawfulness of temporal government over the subjects of the kingdom for which they recognized no king but Christ. While, for the sake of peace, they were willing to render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's, by paying taxes to that government under which they lived, and by even yielding ready obedience to all laws and customs which did not come in conflict with the higher law of the kingdom, the rights of conscience, they universally regarded these laws as extraneous to their own organization, foreign statutes, imposed upon them from without; and, being solicitous to render unto God the things which are God's, they steadily abstained from any participation in the affairs of government, and quietly assumed the right to judge for themselves whether any law, regulation, or custom, prescribed by the sovereign power, or other human authority, was or was not such as they might conscientiously obey. And, while they would no more have thought of holding office under pagan rulers or of participating in their legislation and government than they would have thought of accepting the priesthood of a heathen temple and participating in its idolatrous worship, they obeyed all laws alike, except such as conflicted with conscience, and these they refused to obey in the very face of persecutions, torture, and death. But this fearless assertion of the rights of conscience necessarily involved the right to sit in judgment upon all human laws and the powers that ordained them, and to determine for themselves whether the law was lawful. That helpless spirit of blind obedience to the decrees of despotic governments which characterized the pagan peoples was, therefore, impossible to the Christians. In the very teeth of universally established law and custom, they steadily refused to bear arms, to own slaves, to seek any legal redress in civil courts, to follow the law of their domicile in regard to the ownership of property or the succession to estates of the deceased, just as they refused to sacrifice to the gods, or to call any man master. Under the same lofty conception of the rights of conscience, in lands where women were bought and sold like cattle, they refused to practice polygamy; and in lands where female chastity was unknown and plural wives and concubines were esteemed to be the insignia of honor and influence, they clave fast to that monogamic marriage which Jesus had elevated into a holy sacrament; and while throughout the world women were regarded as slaves, as domestic chattels, or, at the very best, as an inferior race and a necessary evil, so that the birth of a female child was looked upon as a household calamity, the Christian faith that the Holy Ghost conceived Christ before he was born of a virgin and manifested in the flesh, glorified and exalted the dignity of womanhood and maternity, and created the idea of personal responsibility, rights, and duties for both sexes alike. The logical tendency of Christianity was, therefore, to originate the idea of personal liberty for all men, unknown to the world before; to repudiate the heathen doctrine of the divine character and right of kings; to sit in judgment upon their laws, and to intelligently obey, or refuse to obey, them; in a word, to cultivate and exercise, as a matter of religious faith, that spirit of personal independence, both of action and of thought, which we in later times denominate democracy, the concrete form of which was the election of deacons, presbyters, and bishops by the people unto whom they ministered.

But this habit of independent thought did not tend as in later times in the direction of ecclesiastical schisms; because, if any one embraced a doctrinal error, either it was maintained by him as an individual opinion; or if a mistaken zeal led him to proclaim it publicly, and seek thereby to bind the consciences of other Christians, the matter soon came to the knowledge of the churches, and, when the Church assembled to consider the alleged error, the Holy Paraclete directed the counsels of the assembled bishops and presbyters, so that their deliverances were infallibly correct, and were universally accepted as final. So that, during the first three centuries, no heresy could survive the condemnation of a Christian council, and no learning, zeal, and genius could give to heresy such vitality and power as to seriously threaten the peace of the Church. Even Peter could not force the observance of the rite of circumcision upon the free Christian communities; and the heresies of Menander, Cerinthus, Nicolaus, Valentinius, Marcion, Tatianus, Blastus, Montanus, Artimon, and others, perished almost as soon as they had been condemned.

It was perfectly natural, therefore, that while both Arius and Theckla were almost children in many respects, they should both be far advanced in religious learning, each of them in harmony with one of the separate systems under which they had been reared; and that they should be, in many attitudes of thought and feeling, a pleasing enigma to each other. The girl, although brimful of bright and pleasing fancies, had all her life been accustomed to accept as truth whatever was taught to her as such, and the very basis of her training had been implicit and unquestioning obedience to authority without reason, so that she had never, perhaps, attempted to exercise an independent thought, judgment, or inquiry about any question of religious, political, or social life, her existence having been passed in strict and unconscious conformity to rigid Egyptian customs, into the molds and forms of which she had been fashioned from her infancy. The illness of her mother, which left her to the freedom of thought, expression, and action, characteristic of every Christian household, was a new and intoxicating experience to the girl; and, whatever else it might be possible for her to become, it was manifestly impossible that she could ever again resiliate into the moral and social mummyism of ordinary Egyptian female life. The bondage of Egypt was broken.

But the boy, fixed and immovable in his faith in the few salient and all-important doctrines covered by the Apostles' Creed, as that creed was taught during the first three centuries, as to everything else, had been freed by his training from the shackles of authority, and so unconsciously enjoyed and exercised "the liberty of the gospel" in which he had been reared by questioning, investigating, trying every phenomenon--social, religious, and political--that came within the range of his observation and experience.

Am-nem-hat imagined that in these two youthful but well-instructed young people he beheld the living incarnation of the opposing civilizations under which they had been reared; and it was a pathetic and beautiful thing to see with what eager intentness he noted almost every inflection of their voices, every expression of their countenances, almost every peculiar turn and change of their thoughts, while he encouraged them to talk, hardly caring what might be the subject of their conversation.

At the beginning of their little feast the ancient said: "Arius, if ye Christians have any custom of thank-offering, prayer, or libations, before ye partake of food, I would desire to have thee perform or repeat it now."

Then answered Arius: "We make no libation or offering, nor are we restricted to any set formula for returning thanks to God; but generally we repeat the [Greek: Patèr hemon]."

"Wilt thou do so now?"

Then the boy said, "Yea, gladly"; and, while they watched him narrowly, he solemnly said: "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth as in heaven. Give us daily our daily bread; and forgive us our debts as we forgive debtors: and let us not be led into trial, but deliver us from trouble: for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the truth, forever."

Then said Am-nem-hat, "Theckla, what form of worship hast thou been taught to observe before partaking of thy daily food?"

And the girl said: "On solemn occasions, our fathers make libations; but it is not according to Egyptian customs, or religion, for a female to meddle with any sacred rite, beyond her own private devotions, as thou, O priest, must assuredly know."

"Dost thou know the reason, Theckla, that woman is thus excluded, not only from participation in the sacred rites, but from every place that is inconsistent with the idea that she must of necessity be either a slave or a domestic pet, having right to existence only as the appanage of a man upon whom she is dependent as slave, wife, or daughter?"

"Nay," she answered; "but I have been so taught, and, therefore, it must be right and proper."

"I will tell thee, Theckla, for it is verily a thing which every female ought to know. The reason of it is that the original idea of God was that of a dual being, equally divine and glorious in both aspects of his double nature. But nearly all nations, as they sank deeper and deeper into idolatry, degraded the feminine conception of this dualism, and some of them utterly lost it. In Egypt they have held Hes to be consort of Hesiri, and, although inferior to him, yet entitled to great honor. Hence the Egyptian women have never been shut up, kept in seclusion and ignorance, and esteemed only as slaves or as chattels, as is universally the case among nations that have entirely fallen away from the divine truth. But I tell thee, Theckla, that the religion of the Christians alone maintains the absolute equality of the Godhead, by maintaining the Holy Ghost, the Mother of Nature, to be consubstantial with the Father, and hence it alone elevates woman to her true position, and endows her with responsibility, respect and honor, rights and duties; so that, although all men on earth should reject and curse the Christ, every woman, who is true to herself and to her sex, should cleave unto him in spite of pain and even death itself. Do thou remember these things, Theckla; and, when thou shalt see with what respect, honor, and love the Christian husband treateth his wife and daughters, remember thou that the vast difference between them and other men, in that regard, ariseth not out of any difference in the nature or disposition of the individuals, but out of the difference in their religion only; for that faith regardeth women as persons, not as things. Forget not these truths, Theckla! for, whether it be true or false, Christianity alone hath ever done justice to womanhood, wifehood, maternity; and the woman who does not love and follow Jesus betrayeth herself and her sex."

"Surely thou, also, art a Christian!" said the young girl.

"Nay," answered Am-nem-hat; "I say not that to thee! For I can not understand what it is to be a Christian. But, having carefully studied this religion as I have done all others known among mankind, I do solemnly assure thee that it is the only one on earth that is fair and just to chaste and intelligent women. For it teacheth that the equal, consubstantial Holy Spirit conceived a Saviour that was virgin-born; and it so serveth to redeem all womanhood from centuries of contempt and degradation; for no man who hath an intelligent faith in Christianity can ever regard woman as the mere instrument of his pleasure, or as the mere slave of his will, but as a friend, helpmate, and companion, worthy of love, honor, and respect; so that, whether it be true or false, every woman should cleave thereto, because it is for her, at least, temporal salvation. For Christianity differeth as radically from all other religions in regard to the esteem in which it holdeth women as it does in regard to slavery and to the poor. And while the rich and the great may hate this system because it would deprive them of the social and political precedence which every other religion maintaineth for them, the slaves, the poor, and the women should never forget that Jesus Christ is the truest friend they ever had on earth."

Then said Arius, "Father Am-nem-hat, why art not thou a Christian, having views of our religion that are so wise and just?"

And the old man answered: "That thing, my son, I can not tell thee, nor can I comprehend it for myself. I can not understand what is the precise attitude of mine own spirit toward Christianity. Canst thou instruct me?"

"Nay, verily," said Arius. "In my heart I yearn for the power to say something that might open thine eyes unto the light; but my small knowledge and experience serve not to enable me to understand how it is possible that one so aged and so wise, so well instructed in our Lord's own teachings, can fail to be a Christian. But my father was an idolater in his youth, and he is learned in our religion. If thou wilt go home with us, thou shalt be received with honor and affection, and he, perhaps, can give thee aid. Wilt thou not go?"

"I thank thee much," said Am-nem-hat. "But the way is long, and the mountain steep, for one so old as I. And besides, it seemeth to me that, if human knowledge and patient thought could extort any final truth out of the mute lips of Nature, even I could have made her speak!"

"But," said the boy, "the tree of knowledge is not that of life. Even the most ignorant and depraved find peace in believing, and I have met with none so wise as thou. If thou wilt come to us, I will bring hither on to-morrow a she-ass, gentle and sure of foot, which my mother is accustomed to ride, and will walk beside thee to our home, if only thou wilt come."