THE evening darkened over the restless city as Apaecides took his way to the house of the Egyptian. He avoided the more lighted and streets; and as he strode with his head buried in his , and his arms folded within his robe, there was something startling in the contrast, which his solemn and wasted form presented to the thoughtless brows and air of those who occasionally crossed his path.  
At length, however, a man of a more sober and staid , and who had twice passed him with a curious but doubting look, touched him on the shoulder.
 
'Apaecides!' said he, and he made a rapid sign with his hands: it was the sign of the cross.
 
'Well, Nazarene,' replied the priest, and his face grew paler; 'what wouldst thou?'
 
'Nay,' returned the stranger, 'I would not interrupt thy ; but the last time we met, I seemed not to be so unwelcome.'
 
'You are not unwelcome, Olinthus; but I am sad and weary: nor am I able this evening to discuss with you those themes which are most acceptable to you.'
 
'O backward of heart!' said Olinthus, with bitter ; and art thou sad and weary, and thou turn from the very springs that refresh and heal?'
 
'O earth!' cried the young priest, striking his breast , 'from what regions shall my eyes open to the true Olympus, where thy gods really dwell? Am I to believe with this man, that none whom for so many centuries my fathers worshipped have a being or a name? Am I to break down, as something and , the very altars which I have deemed most sacred? or am I to think with Arbaces—what?' He paused, and strode rapidly away in the of a man who strives to get rid of himself. But the Nazarene was one of those , vigorous, and enthusiastic men, by whom God in all times has worked the revolutions of earth, and those, above all, in the establishment and in the reformation of His own religion—men who were formed to convert, because formed to endure. It is men of this mould whom nothing discourages, nothing dismays; in the fervor of belief they are inspired and they inspire. Their reason first their passion, but the passion is the instrument they use; they force themselves into men's hearts, while they appear only to appeal to their . Nothing is so as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus—it moves stones, it charms . Enthusiasm is the genius of , and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
 
Olinthus did not then suffer Apaecides thus easily to escape him. He overtook and addressed him thus:
 
'I do not wonder, Apaecides, that I you; that I shake all the elements of your mind: that you are lost in doubt; that you drift here and there in the vast ocean of uncertain and thought. I wonder not at this, but bear with me a little; watch and pray—the darkness shall vanish, the storm sleep, and God Himself, as He came of yore on the seas of Samaria, shall walk over the billows, to the delivery of your soul. Ours is a religion jealous in its demands, but how in its gifts! It troubles you for an hour, it repays you by .'
 
'Such promises,' said Apaecides, , 'are the tricks by which man is ever . Oh, glorious were the promises which led me to the of Isis!'
 
'But,' answered the Nazarene, 'ask thy reason, can that religion be sound which all morality? You are told to worship your gods. What are those gods, even according to yourselves? What their actions, what their attributes? Are they not all represented to you as the blackest of criminals? yet you are asked to serve them as the holiest of divinities. Jupiter himself is a and an adulterer. What are the meaner but imitators of his ? You are told not to murder, but you worship murderers; you are told not to commit adultery, and you make your prayers to an adulterer! Oh! what is this but a mockery of the holiest part of man's nature, which is faith? Turn now to the God, the one, the true God, to whose shrine I would lead you. If He seem to you too , two shadowy, for those human associations, those connections between Creator and creature, to which the weak heart clings—contemplate Him in His Son, who put on mortality like ourselves. His mortality is not indeed declared, like that of your gods, by the vices of our nature, but by the practice of all its . In Him are united the austerest morals with the tenderest affections. If He were but a man, He had been to become a god. You honour Socrates—he has his , his , his schools. But what are the doubtful virtues of the Athenian, to the bright, the undisputed, the active, the unceasing, the holiness of Christ? I speak to you now only of His human character. He came in that as the pattern of future ages, to show us the form of which Plato thirsted to see . This was the true sacrifice that He made for man; but the halo that encircled His dying hour not only brightened earth, but opened to us the sight of heaven! You are touched—you are moved. God works in your heart. His Spirit is with you. Come, resist not the holy impulse; come at once—unhesitatingly. A few of us are now assembled to the word of God. Come, let me guide you to them. You are sad, you are weary. Listen, then, to the words of God: "Come to me", saith He, "all ye that are heavy , and I will give you rest!"'
 
'I cannot now,' said Apaecides; 'another time.'
 
'Now—now!' exclaimed Olinthus, earnestly, and clasping him by the arm.
 
But Apaecides, yet unprepared for the renunciation of that faith—that life, for which he had sacrificed so much, and still haunted by the promises of the Egyptian, himself forcibly from the grasp; and feeling an effort necessary to conquer the which the of the had begun to effect in his heated and mind, he gathered up his robes and fled away with a speed that defied pursuit.
 
Breathless and , he arrived at last in a remote and part of the city, and the house of the Egyptian stood before him. As he paused to recover himself, the moon emerged from a silver cloud, and shone full upon the walls of that mysterious habitation.
 
No other house was near—the darksome vines clustered far and wide in front of the building and behind it rose a copse of lofty forest trees, sleeping in the moonlight; beyond stretched the dim outline of the distant hills, and amongst them the quiet of Vesuvius, not then so lofty as the traveler it now.
 
Apaecides passed through the arching vines, and arrived at the broad and . Before it, on either side of the steps, the image of the Egyptian sphinx, and the moonlight gave an additional and yet more solemn calm to those large, and , and passionless features, in which the of that type of wisdom united so much of loveliness with ; half way up the of the steps darkened the green and massive of the aloe, and the shadow of the eastern palm cast its long and unwaving over the marble surface of the stairs.
 
Something there was in the stillness of the place, and the strange aspect of the sculptured sphinxes, which thrilled the blood of the priest with a nameless and ghostly fear, and he longed even for an echo to his noiseless steps as he to the threshold.
 
He knocked at the door, over which was an in characters to his eyes; it opened without a sound, and a tall Ethiopian slave, without question or salutation, motioned to him to proceed.
 
The wide hall was lighted by lofty candelabra of elaborate bronze, and round the walls were wrought vast , in dark and solemn colors, which contrasted strangely with the bright and shapes with which the inhabitants of Italy decorated their . At the of the hall, a slave, whose , though not African, was darker by many shades than the usual color of the south, advanced to meet him.
 
'I seek Arbaces,' said the priest; but his voice trembled even in his own ear. The slave bowed his head in silence, and leading Apaecides to a wing without the hall, conducted him up a narrow staircase, and then traversing several rooms, in which the stern and thoughtful beauty of the sphinx still made the chief and most impressive object of the priest's notice, Apaecides found himself in a dim and half-lighted , in the presence of the Egyptian.
 
Arbaces was seated before a small table, on which lay unfolded several of , impressed with the same character as that on the threshold of the . A small tripod stood at a little distance, from the in which the smoke slowly rose. Near this was a vast globe, the signs of heaven; and upon another table lay several instruments, of curious and shape, whose uses were unknown to Apaecides. The farther extremity of the room was by a curtain, and the oblong window in the roof admitted the rays of the moon, sadly with the single lamp which burned in the apartment.
 
'Seat yourself, Apaecides,' said the Egyptian, without rising.
 
The young man obeyed.
 
'You ask me,' resumed Arbaces, after a short pause, in which he seemed absorbed in thought—'You ask me, or would do so, the secrets which the soul of man is fitted to receive; it is the of life itself that you desire me to solve. Placed like children in the dark, and but for a little while, in this dim and confined existence, we shape our spectres in the obscurity; our thoughts now sink back into ourselves in terror, now wildly themselves into the guideless gloom, guessing what it may contain; stretching our helpless hands here and there, lest, blindly, we stumble upon some hidden danger; not knowing the limits of our boundary, now feeling them us with compression, now seeing them extend far away till they vanish into . In this state all wisdom consists necessarily in the solution of two questions: "What are we to believe? and What are we to reject?" These questions you desire me to decide.'
 
Apaecides bowed his head in .
 
'Man must have some belief,' continued the Egyptian, in a tone of sadness. 'He must fasten his hope to something: is our common nature that you inherit when, aghast and terrified to see that in which you have been taught to place your faith swept away, you float over a and shoreless sea of , you cry for help, you ask for some to cling to, some land, however dim and distant, to . Well, then, have not forgotten our conversation of to-day?'
 
'Forgotten!'
 
'I confessed to you that those deities for whom smoke so many altars were but inventions. I confessed to you that our and ceremonies were but mummeries, to and the to their proper good. I explained to you that from those came the bonds of society, the harmony of the world, the power of the wise; that power is in the of the vulgar. Continue we then these salutary delusions—if man must have some belief, continue to him that which his fathers have made dear to him, and which custom sanctifies and strengthens. In seeking a subtler faith for us, whose senses are too spiritual for the gross one, let us leave others that support which from ourselves. This is wise—it is .'
 
'Proceed.'
 
'This being settled,' resumed the Egyptian, 'the old being left uninjured for those whom we are about to desert, we gird up our loins and depart to new climes of faith. Dismiss at once from your recollection, from your thought, all that you have believed before. Suppose the mind a blank, an unwritten , fit to receive impressions for the first time. Look round the world—observe its order—its regularity—its design. Something must have created it—the design speaks a designer: in that certainty we first touch land. But what is that something?—A god, you cry. Stay—no confused and confusing names. Of that which created the world, we know, we can know, nothing, save these attributes—power and unvarying regularity—stern, crushing, regularity—heeding no individual cases—rolling—sweeping—burning on; no matter what hearts, from the general mass, fall ground and beneath its wheels. The mixture of evil with good—the existence of suffering and of crime—in all times have the wise. They created a god—they supposed him benevolent. How then came this evil? why did he permit it—nay, why invent, why it? To account for this, the Persian creates a second spirit, whose nature is evil, and supposes a continual war between that and the god of good. In our own shadowy and tremendous Typhon, the Egyptians image a similar . Perplexing blunder that yet more bewilders us!—folly that arose from the vain that makes a palpable, a , a human being, of this unknown power—that clothes the Invisible with attributes and a nature similar to the Seen. No: to this designer let us give a name that does not command our bewildering associations, and the mystery becomes more clear—that name is NECESSITY. Necessity, say the Greeks, compels the gods. Then why the gods?—their agency becomes unnecessary—dismiss them at once. Necessity is the ruler of all we see—power, regularity—these two qualities make its nature. Would you ask more?—you can learn nothing: whether it be eternal—whether it compel us, its creatures, to new careers after that darkness which we call death—we cannot tell. There leave we this ancient, unseen, unfathomable power, and come to that which, to our eyes, is the great minister of its functions. This we can task more, from this we can learn more: its evidence is around us—its name is NATURE. The error of the has been to direct their researches to the attributes of necessity, where all is gloom and blindness. Had they confined their researches to Nature—what of knowledge might we not already have achieved? Here patience, examination, are never directed in vain. We see what we explore; our minds a palpable ladder of causes and effects. Nature is the great agent of the external universe, and Necessity imposes upon it the laws by which it acts, and imparts to us the powers by which we examine; those powers are curiosity and memory—their union is reason, their perfection is wisdom. Well, then, I examine by the help of these powers this inexhaustible Nature. I examine the earth, the air, the ocean, the heaven: I find that all have a mystic sympathy with each other—that the moon sways the tides—that the air maintains the earth, and is the medium of the life and sense of things—that by the knowledge of the stars we measure the limits of the earth—that we portion out the epochs of time—that by their pale light we are guided into the abyss of the past—that in their solemn we discern the destinies of the future. And thus, while we know not that which Necessity is, we learn, at least, her decrees. And now, what morality do we from this religion?—for religion it is. I believe in two deities—Nature and Necessity; I worship the last by , the first by . What is the morality my religion teaches? This—all things are subject but to general rules; the sun shines for the joy of the many—it may bring sorrow to the few; the night sheds sleep on the multitude—but it harbors murder as well as rest; the forests the earth—but shelter the serpent and the lion; the ocean supports a thousand barks—but it the one. It is only thus for the general, and not for the universal benefit, that Nature acts, and Necessity speeds on her awful course. This is the morality of the agents of the world—it is mine, who am their creature. I would preserve the delusions of priestcraft, for they are serviceable to the multitude; I would impart to man the arts I discover, the science............