Its instructions were precise to stop the proceedings of the misguided Memphites with stern promptitude.  It explained that the death of the Christ Jesus, who shed His blood to redeem the world, had satisfied the need for a human victim.  Throughout the wide realms which the Cross overshadowed with blessing human sacrifice must therefore be accounted a useless and accursed abomination.  It went on to point out how the heathen had devised their gods in the image of weak, sinful, earthly beings, and chosen victims in accordance with this idea.  “But our God,” it said, “is as high above men as the Spirit is above the flesh, and the sacrifice He demands is not of the flesh, but of the spirit.  Will He not turn away in wrath and sorrow from the blinded Christians of Memphis who, in their straits, feel and are about to act like the cruel and foolish heathen?  They take for their victim a heretic and a stranger, deeming that that will diminish the abomination in the eyes of the Lord; but it moves Him to loathing all the same, for no human blood may stain the pure and sacred altars of our mild faith, which gives life and not death.

“Ask your blind and misguided flock, my brother:  Can the Father of Love feel joy at the sight of one of His children, even an erring one, suffocated in the waters to the honor of the Most High, while struggling, and cursing her executioners?

“If, indeed, there were a pure maiden, possessed with the blessed intoxication of the love of God, who was ready to follow the example of Him who redeemed man by His death, to fling herself into the waters while she cried to Heaven with her dying breath:  ’Take me and my innocence as an offering, O Lord!  Release my people from their extremity!’—­that would be a victim indeed; and perchance, the Lord might say:  ’I will accept it; but the will alone is enough.  No child of mine may cast away the life that I have lent her as the most sacred and precious of gifts.’”

The letter ended with pious exhortations to the community.

Then a maiden who should voluntarily sacrifice herself in the river to save the people in their need would be a victim pleasing in the sight of the Lord—­so said the Man of God, through whose mouth the Most High spoke.  And this opinion, this hint, was to Katharina like a distaff from which she spun a lengthening thread to warp to the loom and weave from it a tangible tissue.

She would be the maiden whom the patriarch had imagined—­the real, true Bride of the Nile, inspired to cast off her young life to save her people in their need.  In this there was expiation such as Heaven might accept; this would release her from the burthen of life that weighed upon her, and would reunite her to her mother; in this way she could show her lover and the bishop and all the world the immensity of her self-sacrifice, which was in nothing behind that of “the other”—­the much-vaunted daughter of Thomas!  She would do the great deed before Paula’s eyes, in sight of all the people.  But Orion must know whose image she bore in her heart and for whose sake she made that leap from blooming life into a watery grave.