that their children may get through the world without being jostled or pushed, and unmolested if possible, that they may live longer than the oaks or ravens, and be blessed with the greatest possible number of descendants.  Aye! these ordinances are indeed precious to those who accept them, for they save them the trouble of thinking for themselves.  Besides, the great god of the Jews is said to have dictated all that this book contains to its writers, just as I dictate to Philippus, my hump-backed secretary, all that I want said.  They regard everyone as a blasphemer and desecrator who thinks that anything written in that roll is erroneous, or even merely human.  Plato’s doctrines are not amiss, and yet Aristotle had criticised them severely and attempted to confute them.  I myself incline to the views of the Stagyrite, you to those of the noble Athenian, and how many good and instructive hours we owe to our discussions over this difference of opinion!  And how amusing it is to listen when the Platonists on the one hand and the Aristotelians on the other, among the busy threshers of straw in the Museum at Alexandria, fall together by the ears so vehemently that they would both enjoy flinging their metal cups at each others’ heads—­if the loss of the wine, which I pay for, were not too serious to bear.  We still seek for truth; the Jews believe they possess it entirely.

“Even those among them who most zealously study our philosophers believe this; and yet the writers of this book know of nothing but actual present, and their god—­who will no more endure another god as his equal than a citizen’s wife will admit a second woman to her husband’s house—­is said to have created the world out of nothing for no other purpose but to be worshipped and feared by its inhabitants.

“Now, given a philosophical Jew who knows his Empedocles—­and I grant there are many such in Alexandria, extremely keen and cultivated men—­what idea can he form in his own mind of ‘creation out of nothing?’ Must he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the fundamental axiom that ‘out of nothing, nothing can come,’ and that nothing which has once existed can ever be completely annihilated?  At any rate the necessary deduction must be that the life of man ends in that nothingness whence everything in existence has proceeded.  To live and to die according to this book is not highly profitable.  I can easily reconcile myself to the idea of annihilation, as a man who knows how to value a dreamless sleep after a day brimful of enjoyment—­as a man who if he must cease to be Euergetes would rather spring into the open jaws of nothingness—­but as a philosopher, no, never!”

“You, it is true,” replied the queen, “cannot help measuring all and everything by the intellectual standard exclusively; for the gods, who endowed you with gifts beyond a thousand others, struck with blindness or deafness that organ which conveys to our minds any religious or moral sentiment.  If that could see or hear, you could no more exclude the conviction that these writings are full of the deepest purport than I can, nor doubt that they have a powerful hold on the mind of the reader.