“Yes,” said Kassandane decidedly, “thou canst, and it is thy bounden duty, for a wife ought to have no friends but those her husband calls such.  The gods are a man’s earliest, mightiest and most faithful friends, and it therefore becomes thy duty, as a wife, to honor them, and to close thine heart against strange gods and superstitions, as thou wouldst close it against strange lovers.”

“And,” added Croesus, “we will not rob you of your deities; we will only give them to you under other names.  As Truth remains eternally the same, whether called ‘maa’, as by the Egyptians, or ‘Aletheia’ as by the Greeks, so the essence of the Deity continues unchanged in all places and times.  Listen, my daughter:  I myself, while still king of Lydia, often sacrificed in sincere devotion to the Apollo of the Greeks, without a fear that in so doing I should offend the Lydian sun-god Sandon; the Ionians pay their worship to the Asiatic Cybele, and, now that I have become a Persian, I raise my hands adoringly to Mithras, Ormuzd and the lovely Anahita.  Pythagoras too, whose teaching is not new to you, worships one god only, whom he calls Apollo; because, like the Greek sun-god, he is the source of light and of those harmonies which Pythagoras holds to be higher than all else.  And lastly, Xenophanes of Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single deity on high—­the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence consists of thought, reason and eternity.

[A celebrated freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the Homeric deities.  He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century.  We have quoted some fragments of his writings above.  He committed his speculations also to verse.]

“In this power everything has its rise, and it alone remains unchanged, while all created matter must be continually renewed and perfected.  The ardent longing for some being above us, on whom we can lean when our own powers fail,—­the wonderful instinct which desires a faithful friend to whom we can tell every joy and sorrow without fear of disclosure, the thankfulness with which we behold this beautiful world and all the rich blessings we have received—­these are the feelings which we call piety—­ devotion.

“These you must hold fast; remembering, however, at the same time, that the world is ruled neither by the Egyptian, the Persian, nor the Greek divinities apart from each other, but that all these are one; and that one indivisible Deity, how different soever may be the names and characters under which He is represented, guides the fate of men and nations.”