When Apaecides recovered, with the morning light, from the profound sleep which succeeded to the delirium of wonder and of pleasure, he was, it is true, ashamed—­terrified—­appalled.  His vows of austerity and celibacy echoed in his ear; his thirst after holiness—­had it been quenched at so unhallowed a stream?  But Arbaces knew well the means by which to confirm his conquest.  From the arts of pleasure he led the young priest at once to those of his mysterious wisdom.  He bared to his amazed eyes the initiatory secrets of the sombre philosophy of the Nile—­those secrets plucked from the stars, and the wild chemistry, which, in those days, when Reason herself was but the creature of Imagination, might well pass for the lore of a diviner magic.  He seemed to the young eyes of the priest as a being above mortality, and endowed with supernatural gifts.  That yearning and intense desire for the knowledge which is not of earth—­which had burned from his boyhood in the heart of the priest—­was dazzled, until it confused and mastered his clearer sense.  He gave himself to the art which thus addressed at once the two strongest of human passions, that of pleasure and that of knowledge.  He was loth to believe that one so wise could err, that one so lofty could stoop to deceive.  Entangled in the dark web of metaphysical moralities, he caught at the excuse by which the Egyptian converted vice into a virtue.  His pride was insensibly flattered that Arbaces had deigned to rank him with himself, to set him apart from the laws which bound the vulgar, to make him an august participator, both in the mystic studies and the magic fascinations of the Egyptian’s solitude.  The pure and stern lessons of that creed to which Olinthus had sought to make him convert, were swept away from his memory by the deluge of new passions.  And the Egyptian, who was versed in the articles of that true faith, and who soon learned from his pupil the effect which had been produced upon him by its believers, sought, not unskilfully, to undo that effect, by a tone of reasoning, half-sarcastic and half-earnest.

‘This faith,’ said he, ’is but a borrowed plagiarism from one of the many allegories invented by our priests of old.  Observe,’ he added, pointing to a hieroglyphical scroll—­’observe in these ancient figures the origin of the Christian’s Trinity.  Here are also three gods—­the Deity, the Spirit, and the Son.  Observe, that the epithet of the Son is “Saviour”—­observe, that the sign by which his human qualities are denoted is the cross.’  Note here, too, the mystic history of Osiris, how he put on death; how he lay in the grave; and how, thus fulfilling a solemn atonement, he rose again from the dead!  In these stories we but design to paint an allegory from the operations of nature and the evolutions of the eternal heavens.  But the allegory unknown, the types themselves have furnished to credulous nations the materials of many creeds.  They have travelled to the vast plains of India; they have mixed themselves up in the visionary speculations of the Greek; becoming more and more gross and embodied, as they emerge farther from the shadows of their antique origin, they have assumed a human and palpable form in this novel faith; and the believers of Galilee are but the unconscious repeaters of one of the superstitions of the Nile!’