—­I confess that I smiled internally to hear him say that.  The old Master thinks he is open to conviction on all subjects; but if you meddle with some of his notions and don’t get tossed on his horns as if a bull had hold of you, I should call you lucky.

—­You don’t mean you doubt everything?—­I said.

—­What do you think I question everything for, the Master replied,—­if I never get any answers?  You’ve seen a blind man with a stick, feeling his way along?  Well, I am a blind man with a stick, and I find the world pretty full of men just as blind as I am, but without any stick.  I try the ground to find out whether it is firm or not before I rest my weight on it; but after it has borne my weight, that question at least is answered.  It very certainly was strong enough once; the presumption is that it is strong enough now.  Still the soil may have been undermined, or I may have grown heavier.  Make as much of that as you will.  I say I question everything; but if I find Bunker Hill Monument standing as straight as when I leaned against it a year or ten years ago, I am not very much afraid that Bunker Hill will cave in if I trust myself again on the soil of it.

I glanced off, as one often does in talk.

The Monument is an awful place to visit,—­I said.—–­The waves of time are like the waves of the ocean; the only thing they beat against without destroying it is a rock; and they destroy that at last.  But it takes a good while.  There is a stone now standing in very good order that was as old as a monument of Louis XIV. and Queen Anne’s day is now when Joseph went down into Egypt.  Think of the shaft on Bunker Hill standing in the sunshine on the morning of January 1st in the year 5872!

It won’t be standing,—­the Master said.—–­We are poor bunglers compared to those old Egyptians.  There are no joints in one of their obelisks.  They are our masters in more ways than we know of, and in more ways than some of us are willing to know.  That old Lawgiver wasn’t learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians for nothing.  It scared people well a couple of hundred years ago when Sir John Marsham and Dr. John Spencer ventured to tell their stories about the sacred ceremonies of the Egyptian priesthood.  People are beginning to find out now that you can’t study any religion by itself to any good purpose.  You must have comparative theology as you have comparative anatomy.  What would you make of a cat’s foolish little good-for-nothing collar-bone, if you did not know how the same bone means a good deal in other creatures,—­in yourself, for instance, as you ’ll find out if you break it?  You can’t know too much of your race and its beliefs, if you want to know anything about your Maker.  I never found but one sect large enough to hold the whole of me.

—­And may I ask what that was?—­I said.

—­The Human sect,—­the Master answered.  That has about room enough for me,—­at present, I mean to say.