“I hear you have declined to sing in the temple of Isis; you have been taught to regard the goddess to whom many good men turn in faith and confidence, as a monster of iniquity, but, tell me, do you know what she embodies?”

“No,” replied Agne looking down; but she hastily rose from her seat and added with some spirit:  “And I do not want to know, for I am a Christian and your gods are not mine.”

“Well, well; your beliefs, of course, differ from ours in many points:  still, I fancy that you and I have much in common.  We belong to those who have learnt to ’look upwards’—­there goes the ball, up again!—­and who find comfort in doing so.  Do you know that many men believe that the universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard, guide and lend grace to the lives of men?”

“Oh! yes, I have been obliged to hear many such blasphemous things in Rome!”

“And they ran off you like water off the silvery sheen of that swan’s plumage as he dips and raises his neck.  Those who deny a God are, in your estimation, foolish or perhaps abominable?”

“I pity them, with all my heart.”

“And with very good reason.  You are an orphan and what its parents are to a child the divinity is to every member of the human race.  In this Gorgo, and I, and many others whom you call heathen, feel exactly as you do; but you—­have you ever asked yourself why and how it is that you, to whom life has been so bitter, have such a perfect conviction that there is a benevolent divinity who rules the world and your own fate to kindly ends?  Why, in short, do you believe in a God?”

“I?” said Ague, looking puzzled, but straight into his face.  “How could anything exist without God?  You ask such strange questions.  All I can see was created by our Father in Heaven.”

“But there are men born blind who nevertheless believe in Him.”

“They feel Him just as I see Him.”

“Nay you should say:  ‘As I believe that I see and feel Him.’  But I, for my part, think that the intellect has a right to test what the soul only divines, and that it must be a real happiness to see this divination proved by well-founded arguments, and thus transformed to certainty.  Did you ever hear of Plato, the philosopher?”

“Yes, Karnis often speaks of him when he and Orpheus are discussing things which I do not understand.”

“Well, Plato, by his intellect, worked out the proof of the problem which our feelings alone are so capable of apprehending rightly.  Listen to me:  If you stand on a spit of land at the entrance to a harbor and see a ship in the distance sailing towards you—­a ship which carefully avoids the rocks, and makes straight for the shelter of the port—­are you not justified in concluding that there is, on board that ship, a man who guides and steers it?  Certainly.  You not only may,