Apaecides bowed his head in assent.

‘Man must have some belief,’ continued the Egyptian, in a tone of sadness.  ’He must fasten his hope to something:  is our common nature that you inherit when, aghast and terrified to see that in which you have been taught to place your faith swept away, you float over a dreary and shoreless sea of incertitude, you cry for help, you ask for some plank to cling to, some land, however dim and distant, to attain.  Well, then, have not forgotten our conversation of to-day?’

‘Forgotten!’

’I confessed to you that those deities for whom smoke so many altars were but inventions.  I confessed to you that our rites and ceremonies were but mummeries, to delude and lure the herd to their proper good.  I explained to you that from those delusions came the bonds of society, the harmony of the world, the power of the wise; that power is in the obedience of the vulgar.  Continue we then these salutary delusions—­if man must have some belief, continue to him that which his fathers have made dear to him, and which custom sanctifies and strengthens.  In seeking a subtler faith for us, whose senses are too spiritual for the gross one, let us leave others that support which crumbles from ourselves.  This is wise—­it is benevolent.’

‘Proceed.’

‘This being settled,’ resumed the Egyptian, ’the old landmarks being left uninjured for those whom we are about to desert, we gird up our loins and depart to new climes of faith.  Dismiss at once from your recollection, from your thought, all that you have believed before.  Suppose the mind a blank, an unwritten scroll, fit to receive impressions for the first time.  Look round the world—­observe its order—­its regularity—­its design.  Something must have created it—­the design speaks a designer:  in that certainty we first touch land.  But what is that something?—­A god, you cry.  Stay—­no confused and confusing names.  Of that which created the world, we know, we can know, nothing, save these attributes—­power and unvarying regularity—­stern, crushing, relentless regularity—­heeding no individual cases—­rolling—­sweeping—­burning on; no matter what scattered hearts, severed from the general mass, fall ground and scorched beneath its wheels.  The mixture of evil with good—­the existence of suffering and of crime—­in all times have perplexed the wise.  They created a god—­they supposed him benevolent.  How then came this evil? why did he permit it—­nay, why invent, why perpetuate it?  To account for this, the Persian creates a second spirit, whose nature is evil, and supposes a continual war between that and the god of good.  In our own shadowy and tremendous Typhon, the Egyptians image a similar demon.  Perplexing blunder that yet more bewilders us!—­folly that arose from the vain delusion that makes a palpable, a corporeal, a human being, of this unknown power—­that clothes the Invisible with attributes and a nature