‘Let him,’ repeated simultaneously the rest—­men who, with two exceptions, were evidently of the inferior ranks.  In these exceptions, Apaecides noted an officer of the guard, and an Alexandrian merchant.

‘We do not,’ recommenced Olinthus—­’we do not bind you to secrecy; we impose on you no oaths (as some of our weaker brethren would do) not to betray us.  It is true, indeed, that there is no absolute law against us; but the multitude, more savage than their rulers, thirst for our lives.  So, my friends, when Pilate would have hesitated, it was the people who shouted “Christ to the cross!” But we bind you not to our safety—­no!  Betray us to the crowd—­impeach, calumniate, malign us if you will—­we are above death, we should walk cheerfully to the den of the lion, or the rack of the torturer—­we can trample down the darkness of the grave, and what is death to a criminal is eternity to the Christian.’

A low and applauding murmur ran through the assembly.

’Thou comest amongst us as an examiner, mayest thou remain a convert!  Our religion? you behold it!  Yon cross our sole image, yon scroll the mysteries of our Caere and Eleusis!  Our morality? it is in our lives!—­sinners we all have been; who now can accuse us of a crime? we have baptized ourselves from the past.  Think not that this is of us, it is of God.  Approach, Medon,’ beckoning to the old slave who had spoken third for the admission of Apaecides, ’thou art the sole man amongst us who is not free.  But in heaven, the last shall be first:  so with us.  Unfold your scroll, read and explain.’

Useless would it be for us to accompany the lecture of Medon, or the comments of the congregation.  Familiar now are those doctrines, then strange and new.  Eighteen centuries have left us little to expound upon the lore of Scripture or the life of Christ.  To us, too, there would seem little congenial in the doubts that occurred to a heathen priest, and little learned in the answers they receive from men uneducated, rude, and simple, possessing only the knowledge that they were greater than they seemed.

There was one thing that greatly touched the Neapolitan:  when the lecture was concluded, they heard a very gentle knock at the door; the password was given, and replied to; the door opened, and two young children, the eldest of whom might have told its seventh year, entered timidly; they were the children of the master of the house, that dark and hardy Syrian, whose youth had been spent in pillage and bloodshed.  The eldest of the congregation (it was that old slave) opened to them his arms; they fled to the shelter—­they crept to his breast—­and his hard features smiled as he caressed them.  And then these bold and fervent men, nursed in vicissitude, beaten by the rough winds of life—­men of mailed and impervious fortitude, ready to affront a world, prepared for torment and armed for death—­men, who presented all imaginable contrast to the weak nerves,