“They fetter their adherents to a fixed law, but they take all bitterness out of sorrow by teaching that a stern father sends us suffering which is represented as being sometimes a means of education, and sometimes a punishment for transgressing a hard and clearly defined law.  Their god, in his infallible but stern wisdom, sets those who cling to him on an evil and stony path to prove their strength, and to let them at last reach the glorious goal which is revealed to them from the beginning.”

“How strange such words as these sound in the mouth of a Greek,” interrupted Euergetes.  “You certainly must be repeating them after the son of the Jewish high-priest, who defends the cause of his cruel god with so much warmth and skill.”

“I should have thought,” retorted Cleopatra, “that this overwhelming figure of a god would have pleased you, of all men; for I know of no weakness in you.  Quite lately Dositheos, the Jewish centurion—­a very learned man—­tried to describe to my husband the one great god to whom his nation adheres with such obstinate fidelity, but I could not help thinking of our beautiful and happy gods as a gay company of amorous lords and pleasure-loving ladies, and comparing them with this stern and powerful being who, if only he chose to do it, might swallow them all up, as Chronos swallowed his own children.”

“That,” exclaimed Euergetes, “is exactly what most provokes me in this superstition.  It crushes our light-hearted pleasure in life, and whenever I have been reading the book of the Hebrews everything has come into my mind that I least like to think of.  It is like an importunate creditor that reminds us of our forgotten debts, and I love pleasure and hate an importunate reminder.  And you, pretty one, life blooms for you—­”

“But I,” interrupted Cleopatra, “I can admire all that is great; and does it not seem a bold and grand thing even to you, that the mighty idea that it is one single power that moves and fills the world, should be freely and openly declared in the sacred writings of the Jews—­an idea which the Egyptians carefully wrap up and conceal, which the priests of the Nile only venture to divulge to the most privileged of those who are initiated into their mysteries, and which—­though the Greek philosophers indeed have fearlessly uttered it—­has never been introduced by any Hellene into the religion of the people?  If you were not so averse to the Hebrew nation, and if you, like my husband and myself, had diligently occupied yourself with their concerns and their belief you would be juster to them and to their scriptures, and to the great creating and preserving spirit, their god—­”

“You are confounding this jealous and most unamiable and ill-tempered tyrant of the universe with the Absolute of Aristotle!” cried Euergetes; “he stigmatises most of what you and I and all rational Greeks require for the enjoyment of life as sin—­sin upon sin.  And yet if my easily persuadable brother governed at Alexandria, I believe the shrewd priests might succeed in stamping him as a worshipper of that magnified schoolmaster, who punishes his untutored brood with fire and torment.”