“Have you nothing new to say on the subject?” interposed Heliobas, with a slight smile.  “I have heard all this so often before, from divers kinds of men both educated and ignorant, who have a willful habit of forgetting all that Christ Himself prophesied concerning His creed of Self-renunciation, so difficult to selfish humanity:  ’Think not that I come to send peace on the earth.  I come, not to send peace, but a sword.’  Again ’Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake.’ ... ‘all ye shall be offended because of me.’  Such plain words as these seem utterly thrown away upon this present generation.  And do you know I find a curious lack of originality among so-called ‘freethinkers’; in fact their thoughts can hardly be designated as ‘free’ when they all run in such extremely narrow grooves of similitude—­a flock of sheep mildly trotting under the guidance of the butcher to the slaughterhouse could not be more tamely alike in their bleating ignorance as to where they are going.  Your opinions, for instance, differ scarce a whit from those of the common boor who, reading his penny Radical paper, thinks he can dispense with God, and talks of the ‘carpenter’s son of Judea’ with the same easy flippancy and scant reverence as yourself.  The ‘intellectual minds of the day’ to which you allude, are extraordinarily limited of comprehension, and none of them, literary or otherwise, have such a grasp of knowledge as any of these dead and gone authors,” and he waved his hand toward the surrounding loaded bookshelves, “who lived centuries ago, and are now, as far as the general public is concerned, forgotten.  All the volumes you see here are vellum manuscripts copied from the original slabs of baked clay, stone tablets, and engraved sheets of ivory, and among them is an ingenious treatise by one Remeni Adranos, chief astronomer to the then king of Babylonia, setting forth the Atom and Evolution theory with far more clearness and precision than any of your modern professors.  All such propositions are old—­old as the hills, I assure you; and these days in which you live are more suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its progressive prime.  Especially in your own country the general dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of Shakespeare.  In that land you,—­who, according to your own showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and inspiration to still higher endeavor—­you have been, poisoned by the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise and ‘highly cultured’ to believe in anything.  It is a most unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes of national disease and downfall; it is difficult to breathe it without becoming fever-smitten; and in your denial of the divinity of Christ, I do not blame you any more than I would blame a poor creature struck down by a plague.  You have caught the negative, agnostic, and atheistical infection from others,—­it is not the natural, healthy condition of your temperament.”