Resurrection, to teach us that this life is not the all, but only one loop in the chain of existence, . . only one of the ‘many mansions’ in the Father’s House.  Human teachers of high morals there have always been in the world,—­Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, . . there is no end to them, and their teachings have been valuable so far as they went, but even Plato’s majestic arguments in favor of the Immortality of the Soul fall short of anything sure and graspable.  There were so many prefigurements of what was to come, . . just as the sign of the Cross was used in the Temple of Serapis, and was held in singular mystic veneration by various tribes of Egyptians, Arabians, and Indians, ages before Christ came.  And now that these prefigurements have resolved themselves into an actual Divine Symbol, the doubting world still hesitates, and by this hesitation paralyzes both its Will and Instinct—­so that it fails to cut out the core of Christianity’s true solution, or to learn what Christ really meant when He said ’I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, —­no man cometh to the Father but by Me.’  Have you ever considered the particular weight of that word ‘man’ in that text?  It is rightly specified that ’no man cometh ’—­for there are hosts of other beings, in other universes, who are not of our puny race, and who do not need to be taught either the way, truth, or life, as they know all three, and have never lost their knowledge from the beginning.”

His voice quivered a little, and he paused,—­Villiers watched him with a strange sense of ever-deepening fascination and wonder.

“I have lately studied the whole thing carefully,".. he resumed presently, . . “and I see no reason why we, who call ourselves a progressive generation, should revert back to the old theory of Corinthus, who, as early as sixty-seven years after Christ, denied His Divinity.  There is nothing new in the hypothesis—­it is no more original than the doctrine of evolution, which was skilfully enough handled by Democritus, and probably by many another before him.  Voltaire certainly threshed out the subject exhaustively, . . and I think Carlyle’s address to him on the uselessness of his work is one of the finest of its kind.  Do you remember it?”

Villiers shook his head in the negative, whereupon Alwyn rose, and glancing along an evidently well-remembered book-shelf, took from thence “Sartor Resartus”—­and turned over the pages quickly.

“Here it is,”—­and he read out the following passage.. “’Cease, my much-respected Herr von Voltaire, . . shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished.  Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise:  That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth.  Alas, were thy six-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos and folios and flying sheets or reams, printed before and since on the same subject, all needed to convince us of so little!  But what next?  Wilt thou help us to embody the Divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?  What! thou hast no faculty in that kind?  Only a torch for burning and no hammer for building?  Take our thanks then—­and thyself away!’”