little more significance than that of the women who accompanied them. Vanity, the desire to be talked about, was the probable motive in both cases, unless, indeed, the women changed their religion to disconcert their husbands.

PAS. How many hearts the preacher may have turned to the true faith is known only to the Searcher of hearts; how many eyes he may have opened is the secret of the Father of lights. But sure am I that ridicule of their errors would only have hardened and blinded those whose pride and whose vision it was the aim of the Apostle, to subdue and purge.

Luc. It may be so; but it surprises me, O worthiest one, to hear you say so. But sparingly, I think, did you yourself practise that mode of treating error which you applaud in Paulos? Your works belie your doctrines.

PAS. My works, O Lucian! What can you know of them?

LUC. There are those among us, O most subtle of disputants, who have them by heart; and many a time have I listened to their recitation with wonder and delight.

PAS. Truly? I should not have thought that I had any admirer so devoted as to have studied me thus.

Luc. Nor have you, at least to my knowledge. Those who have thus intently applied themselves to your writings are not your disciples but your adversaries. They recite your Letters with protestations of their falsehood, and maledictions of their author. But to me who care not an obolus whether your charges against this sect were just or unjust, the skill of your attack and the glitter of your

weapon afford perpetual pleasure. Plato himself was not a more consummate master of the dialogue; nor shall you find a keener dialectic, a clearer analysis, an irony more demurely deadly in the interrogatories of the Platonic Socrates. I have, it is true, no learning in that lore of mysticism which you handle in your earlier disputations. I cannot follow your deliverances on "sufficient grace and “proximate power." But the ethics of conduct are matter of interest to the philosophers of every age, and wit is the special inheritance of the Greek. I have listened to your recited colloquies with the-how call you him? Jesuit, casuist, as I should have listened, had the gods allowed me the opportunity, to the Socratic elenchus of an Athenian sophist. I have watched the discomfiture of "Father Bauny" as I should have watched the toils a-tightening round the entangled feet of Thrasymachus. With what disarming courtesy do you approach your doomed antagonist! With what blandly feigned indifference do you propound the questions which are to undo him! There is the stealth of the serpent in your advance, the fascination of his eye in your grave intentness; it is with his leisurely cruelty that you press your victim into the corner from which there is no retreat; and the mortal blow is at last delivered with all the dazzling swiftness of the reptile's darting tongue. But I do not call this dealing tenderly with error.

PAS. Nor should such error be tenderly dealt with. You have failed, my friend, to distinguish between the erroneous and the corrupt. Honest superstition must be warily and gently ridded, for it has its root in religion,

and draws its vital sap from the same soil; immoral doctrines of morality cannot with too stern a swiftness be cut away. It is the difference between the parasite and the gangrene, between the natural outgrowth which may kill, but can only slowly kill the parent stock, and the morbid excrescence which is filtering its alien poison at every instant through the ducts of life.

LUC. I greatly admire your aptitude in comparisons and contrasts. It seems to be a talent peculiar to the moderns. The disputants of my own time would never have thought of attempting to prove a proposition by drawing a couple of pictures and declaring that their resemblance or difference was an argument."

PAS. Analogy however is no unsafe guide, if wisely used. You said just now that you cared not an obolus whether my charges against the Jesuits were just or unjust; but you meant, I suppose, that you cared not whether I had truly or falsely imputed to these doctors the teaching which I condemned. Assuming that I imputed it truly (and the accuracy and fairness of my citations from their casuists I have maintained by an unanswered challenge) you will not, I think, dispute the justice of my comparison. Murder, theft, adultery, are surely among the worst diseases of the body social and what but poison is that doctrine, what but poisoners those teachers through which and whom these loathsome maladies are propagated?

LUC. Gently, gently, O best of men! I may grant you your "poison" perhaps, but "poisoner" begs the question. Administer the antidote with all speed; purge and sweat the sufferer to your heart's content; but be not in too great

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a hurry to crucify the rival physician. Let us first be sure that he mistook not the poison for a wholesome drug.

PAS. You never knew these men, O Lucian. They were no mistaken theorists; they were conscious charlatans treating their patients with sweet, if deadly medicaments, that they might swell the concourse into their consulting chambers and increase their gains.

LUC. They were blinded then by self-interest, and they may be the more leniently judged on that account.

PAS. Leniently! the more leniently for having not merely betrayed but trafficked with their trust. I cannot hope, O Lucian, to find even in the best of pagans the Christian horror of sin but you, who were a philosopher, you, who loved temperance and justice, and were true, according to your imperfect lights, to the nobler conception of human life, bethink you what it is that such men do. Enrolled like ourselves in the army of virtue, clad in its uniform, bound by its oath, practising its exercises, they move unsuspected in our midst, and, for their own advancement, sell the citadel to the besieging passions. By the code of every nation, by the usage of every army, such men are adjudged to die.

LUC. It is to be hoped so; for you have certainly put these men to death. You hurled the traitors from the Capitol-I will not say from the Tarpeian rock, for that place of punishment took its name from the criminal who first suffered there, whereas it is through your Letters alone, they tell me, that these obscure malefactors will be remembered. But I can well conceive how you must have exulted in the execution of their sentence.

PAS. There, O Lucian, you are in error.

exultation, or at least I willingly indulged none.

I felt no

LUC. What! tenderness again? I thought that to error of this kind no tenderness was to be shown.

PAS. Nor was it. But sternness in inflicting punishment is a different thing from delight in its infliction.

LUC. In the goodness of your heart you misunderstand me. The exercise of skill is delightful in what art soever or upon whatsoever object it be exercised. Even the idle rhetoric to which I gave up my youth was not without its charms. I rejoiced in it as an adept, even after I had learned to despise it as a philosopher. The handicraft of my uncle I hated with all my heart; I would not have given up an hour of meditation to have carven the Zeus of Phidias. But I have seen the sculptor's chisel strike fire from himself, and his soul leap through his eyes to meet the life which the fool fancied he had breathed into the marble. Rhetorician and statuary in one, your writings must surely have gratified both your sense of power and your love of beauty; you must have rejoiced alike in your unerring dexterity of workmanship and in the flawless nobility of your work.

PAS. I am not so self-righteous as to deny it, nor within the limits which our faith prescribes to us, need I scruple to acknowledge it. It is natural for man to find pleasure in the exercise of the faculties which God has given him: their Divine Bestower has, in the inscrutable counsels of His providence, so ordained it. 'Tis through the earthly delights which He has provided, through the earthly desires which He has implanted, that He perpetuates the