“It is well, it is well—­the more I suffer the more surely shall I find grace.  And besides, if the old man had seen Hermas go through what I have experienced it would undoubtedly have killed him.  Certainly I wish it could have been done without—­without—­aye, it is even so—­without deceit; even when I was a heathen I was truthful and held a lie, whether in myself or in another, in as deep horror as father Abraham held murder, and yet when the Lord required him, he led his son Isaac to the slaughter.  And Moses when he beat the overseer—­and Elias, and Deborah, and Judith.  I have taken upon myself no less than they, but my lie will surely be forgiven me, if it is not reckoned against them that they shed blood.”

These and such reflections restored Paulus to equanimity and to satisfaction with his conduct, and he began to consider, whether he should return to his old cave and the neighborhood of Stephanus, or seek for a new abode.  He decided on the latter course; but first he must find fresh water and some sort of nourishment; for his mouth and tongue were quite parched.

Lower down in the valley sprang a brooklet of which he knew, and hard by it grew various herbs and roots, with which he had often allayed his hunger.  He followed the declivity to its base, then turning to the left, he crossed a small table land, which was easily accessible from the gorge, but which on the side of the oasis formed a perpendicular cliff many fathoms deep.  Between it and the main mass of the mountain rose numerous single peaks, like a camp of granite tents, or a wildly tossing sea suddenly turned to stone; behind these blocks ran the streamlet, which he found after a short search.

Perfectly refreshed, and with renewed resolve to bear the worst with patience, he returned to the plateau, and from the edge of the precipice he gazed down into the desert gorge that stretched away far below his feet, and in whose deepest and remotest hollow the palmgroves and tamarisk-thickets of the oasis showed as a sharply defined mass of green, like a luxuriant wreath flung upon a bier.  The whitewashed roofs of the little town of Pharan shone brightly among the branches and clumps of verdure, and above them all rose the new church, which he was now forbidden to enter.  For a moment the thought was keenly painful that he was excluded from the devotions of the community, from the Lord’s supper and from congregational prayer, but then he asked, was not every block of stone on the mountain an altar—­was not the blue sky above a thousand times wider, and more splendid than the mightiest dome raised by the hand of man, not even excepting the vaulted roof of the Serapeum at Alexandria, and he remembered the “Amen” of the stones, that had rung out after the preaching of the blind man.  By this time he had quite recovered himself, and he went towards the cliff in order to find a cavern that he knew of, and that was empty—­for its gray-headed inhabitant had died some weeks since.  “Verily,” thought he, “it seems to me that I am by no means weighed down by the burden of my disgrace, but, on the contrary, lifted up.  Here at least I need not cast down my eyes, for I am alone with my God, and in his presence I feel I need not be ashamed.”