“The divinity ought no doubt to be above all else to us,” Melissa observed.  “But when your laborer worships the sun, and looks for its benefits, what is the difference between him and you, or me, or any of us, though we call the sun Helios or Serapis, or what not?”

“Yes, yes,” replied Andreas.  “The sun is adored here under many different names and forms, and your Serapis has swallowed up not only Zeus and Pluto, but Phoebus Apollo and the Egyptian Osiris and Ammon, and Ra, to swell his own importance.  But to be serious, child, our fathers made to themselves many gods indeed, of the sublime phenomena and powers of Nature, and worshiped them admiringly; but to us only the names remain, and those who offer to Apollo never think of the sun.  With my laborer, who is an Arab, it is different.  He believes the light-giving globe itself to be a god; and you, I perceive, do not think him wholly wrong.  But when you see a youth throw the discus with splendid strength, do you praise the discus, or the thrower?”

“The thrower,” replied Melissa.  “But Phoebus Apollo himself guides his chariot with his divine hands.”

“And astronomers,” the Christian went on, “can calculate for years to come exactly where his steeds will be at each minute of the time.  So no one can be more completely a slave than he to whom so many mortals pray that he will, of his own free-will, guide circumstances to suit them.  I, therefore, regard the sun as a star, like any other star; and worship should be given, not to those rolling spheres moving across the sky in prescribed paths, but to Him who created them and guides them by fixed laws.  I really pity your Apollo and the whole host of the Olympian gods, since the world has become possessed by the mad idea that the gods and daimons may be moved, or even compelled, by forms of prayer and sacrifices and magic arts, to grant to each worshiper the particular thing on which he may have set his covetous and changeable fancy.”

“And yet,” exclaimed Melissa, “you yourself told me that you prayed for my mother when the leech saw no further hope.  Every one hopes for a miracle from the immortals when his own power has come to an end!  Thousands think so.  And in our city the people have never been more religious than they are now.  The singer of the Ialemos at the feast of Adonis particularly praised us for it.”

“Because they have never been more fervently addicted to pleasure, and therefore have never more deeply dreaded the terrors of hades.  The great and splendid Zeus of the Greeks has been transformed into Serapis here, on the banks of the Nile, and has become a god of the nether world.  Most of the ceremonies and mysteries to which the people crowd are connected with death.  They hope that the folly over which they waste so many hours will smooth their way to the fields of the blest, and yet they themselves close the road by the pleasures they indulge in.  But the fullness of time is now come; the