whom I ought already to have better known.  I have—­no matter—­no matter! suffice it, I have added perjury and sin to rashness and to sorrow.  The veil is now rent for ever from my eyes; I behold a villain where I obeyed a demigod; the earth darkens in my sight; I am in the deepest abyss of gloom; I know not if there be gods above; if we are the things of chance; if beyond the bounded and melancholy present there is annihilation or an hereafter—­tell me, then, thy faith; solve me these doubts, if thou hast indeed the power!’

‘I do not marvel,’ answered the Nazarene, ’that thou hast thus erred, or that thou art thus sceptic.  Eighty years ago there was no assurance to man of God, or of a certain and definite future beyond the grave.  New laws are declared to him who has ears—­a heaven, a true Olympus, is revealed to him who has eyes—­heed then, and listen.’

And with all the earnestness of a man believing ardently himself, and zealous to convert, the Nazarene poured forth to Apaecides the assurances of Scriptural promise.  He spoke first of the sufferings and miracles of Christ—­he wept as he spoke:  he turned next to the glories of the Saviour’s Ascension—­to the clear predictions of Revelation.  He described that pure and unsensual heaven destined to the virtuous—­those fires and torments that were the doom of guilt.

The doubts which spring up to the mind of later reasoners, in the immensity of the sacrifice of God to man, were not such as would occur to an early heathen.  He had been accustomed to believe that the gods had lived upon earth, and taken upon themselves the forms of men; had shared in human passions, in human labours, and in human misfortunes.  What was the travail of his own Alcmena’s son, whose altars now smoked with the incense of countless cities, but a toil for the human race?  Had not the great Dorian Apollo expiated a mystic sin by descending to the grave?  Those who were the deities of heaven had been the lawgivers or benefactors on earth, and gratitude had led to worship.  It seemed therefore, to the heathen, a doctrine neither new nor strange, that Christ had been sent from heaven, that an immortal had indued mortality, and tasted the bitterness of death.  And the end for which He thus toiled and thus suffered—­how far more glorious did it seem to Apaecides than that for which the deities of old had visited the nether world, and passed through the gates of death!  Was it not worthy of a God to, descend to these dim valleys, in order to clear up the clouds gathered over the dark mount beyond—­to satisfy the doubts of sages—­to convert speculation into certainty—­by example to point out the rules of life—­by revelation to solve the enigma of the grave—­and to prove that the soul did not yearn in vain when it dreamed of an immortality?  In this last was the great argument of those lowly men destined to convert the earth.  As nothing is more flattering to the pride and the hopes of man than the belief in a future