own-I cannot call it our own-party which would have laid bare its imposture to the world.

LORD B. And you would really have thought so, Sir Robert? How strange then is the irony of circumstance! The hands which were to have unmasked the Minister have just unveiled his statue.

LUCIAN AND PASCAL.

LUC. Confess now, O my friend, if that name offends you not, that you have done me some injustice.

PAS. You are certainly more reverent in your speech than in your writings, and perhaps in your mind than in your speech. But you may easily forgive me for having thought worse of you than you deserved. Historic tradition has branded you as a wanton mocker at holy things, whose insults to the supernatural were punished even in the upper world. Suidas, you may perhaps have heard, declared that you were devoured by dogs.

LUC. Suidas has himself been devoured, and by a more voracious than the canine maw. Oblivion, I understand, has left nothing of him but the name-unless indeed his surviving scholia may be taken to represent his brains, rejected by indigestion, or spared by malice. But I need not grudge his shadowy immortality to this pedant, who hardly lives, even for scholars, save in his spiteful fablings about me.

PAS. If letters really humanised, he would have judged far more charitably. A scoffer at the gods you may have been, but I see now that you were something more and better than that.

LUC. Better? I do not know that I can accept the compliment. I honoured wisdom; I revered virtue; I would have kissed the feet of Truth if I could have found my way to her through the crowd of philosophers. But I must rank myself lower as a follower of the good than as a destroyer of the evil. The false and filthy legends of our Pantheon

PAS. Were the human pollutions of a divine springa fountain of living water which from the dawn of man's perceptions has, by God's all-merciful ordinance, welled up perennially in the human heart. The stream, I own, was flowing dull and turbid enough in your day throughout the heathen world: but you did not seek to cleanse it; you did not help the followers of Him whom you called-may the blasphemy be forgiven you!—the “Crucified Sophist" to turn its waters into a purer channel. You strove to dam them at their source.

LUC. Your metaphors mislead you, O excellent one; you cannot know how utterly vile was our religion,

PAS. Nay, it is language which misleads you. That which was vile was not religion, but the exterior symbols of the cult. Religion is in the soul, and, implanted there by the Holy One, it is of kin to holiness alone, It touches, it is touched, by nothing base or foul. But wheresoever in the world the soul of man has been lifted up in prayer or thanksgiving to an invisible Power, there, in whatever ignoble liturgy of paganism, the true God has been worshipped. It was thus, as our apostle told your philosophers, that "He left Himself not without witness, in that He did good, and sent us rain and fruitful seasons,

filling our hearts with food and gladness." I cannot doubt but that many a simple husbandman of Hellas, blessed with an abundant harvest, has in this sense given thanks to the Unknown God, and that while his foolish altar-fumes lingered round the senseless image of Demeter, the incense of his spirit reached the throne of the Most High.

LUC. I should be glad to believe it-if only for the assurance that the Supreme Being is not so savage and childish as to need placation by the steam of victims. I should wish to think of him as one who would be content with the love and gratitude of his creatures, letting the roasted kids go where they might. I have never had anything to say against your grateful husbandman of Hellas. His religion has been unassailed by me.

PAS. Nay, for you destroyed its symbols, and symbolism is the only articulate speech of religion for the ruder tongue. Deprived of symbolism the religious spirit of the mass of mankind must droop and languish, as thought itself would wither among a community of the dumb.

Luc. But surely one may rid a language of a few of its barbarisms, and purge its lexicon of the obscene slang which has too long passed for classical.

PAS. Not, O Lucian, as you essayed to do so. Superstition may mar religion, but you cannot, by the method of ridicule, destroy the one and leave the other untouched. Superstition is to religion as the parasite to the oak; and ridicule is as the axe set to do the work of the pruningknife. Not in your fashion did that greatest Apostle of

our religion, whom but now I cited to you, attempt your task. It was with no words of taunt or railing that he, who never feared the face of man in his denunciations, addressed your Athenian sages on the Hill of Mars. The very excesses of their Polytheism were turned to the orator's purpose. He praised them for their profound

'religious awe;" for it is this and not "superstition” that detoidaiμovía signifies; and appealing to the Altar of the ΑΓΝΩΣΤΟΣ ΘΕΟΣ as the warrant for his praises, he suddenly assumed the priesthood of that untended shrine. "Whom therefore ye unknowingly worship, Him declare I unto you."

. LUC. Yes, I have heard of the speech from those who were among its audience. Its exordium was certainly a master stroke of rhetorical tact; and I have always wondered at such graceful urbanity in a Jew.

PAS. There was grace in it indeed, O Lucian, but in a higher sense of the word than yours. It was the expression of the Apostle's inspired sympathy with all forms of the emotion of worship.

LUC. May be: but it produced all the effect of the most studied, and the most undeserved flattery. The Athenians multiplied gods for the sake of multiplying arguments. I doubt whether the Stoic and Epicurean babblers whom Paulos addressed had so much as had experience of the "emotion of worship" in their lives.

PAS. Surely you wrong them. We know that the Apostle made converts from among their number.

Luc. Your innocence is childlike, O best of men. The accession of a few philosophers to your religion was of