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P. “But shall we despise and hate such, Oh Socrates?”

S. “No, dearest boy, we will rather pity and instruct them lovingly; remembering always that we shall become such as they the moment we begin to fancy that truth is our own possession, and not the very beauty of Zeus himself, which he shows to those whom he will, and in such measure as he finds them worthy to behold. But to me, considering how great must be the condescension of Zeus in unveiling to any man, even the worthiest, the least portion of his own loveliness, there has come at times a sort of dream, that the divine splendour will at last pierce through and illumine all dark souls, even in the house of Hades, showing them, as by a great sunrise, both what they themselves, and what all other things are, really and in the sight of Zeus; which if it happened, even to Ixion, I believe that his wheel would stop, and his fetters drop off of themselves, and that he would return freely to the upper air, for as long as he himself might choose.”

Just then the people began to throng into the Pnyx; and we took our places with the rest to hear the business of the day, after Socrates had privately uttered this prayer:

“Oh Zeus, give to me and to all who shall counsel here this day, that spirit of truth by which we may behold that whereof we deliberate, as it is in thy sight!”

“As I expected,” said Templeton, with a smile, as I folded up my manuscript. “My friend the parson could not demolish the poor Professor’s bad logic without a little professional touch by way of finish.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh-never mind. Only I owe you little thanks for sweeping away any one of my lingering sympathies with Mr. Windrush, if all you can offer me instead is the confounded old nostrum of religion over again.”

“Heydey, friend! What next?”

“Really, my dear fellow, I beg your pardon, I forgot that I was speaking to a clergyman.”

“Pray don’t beg my pardon on that ground. If what you say be right, a clergyman above all others ought to hear it; and if it be wrong, and a symptom of spiritual disease, he ought to hear it all the more. But I cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, till I know what you mean by religion; for there is a great deal of very truly confounded and confounding religion abroad in the world just now, as there has been in all ages; and perhaps you may be alluding to that.”

Templeton sat silent for a few minutes, playing with the tackle in his fly-book, and then murmured to himself the well-known lines of Lucretius:

“Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret
In terris oppressa gravi sub Relligione
Quae caput a coeli regionibus ostendebat,
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.

There!-blasphemous reprobate fellow, am I not?”

“On the contrary,” I said, “I think that in the sense in which Lucretius intended that the lines should be taken, they contain a great deal of truth. He had seen the basest and foullest crimes spring from that which he calls Relligio, and he had a full right to state that fact. I am not aware that one blasphemes the Catholic and Apostolic Faith by saying that the devilries of the Spanish Inquisition were the direct offspring of that ‘religious sentiment’ which Mr. Windrush’s school-though they are at all events right in saying that its source is in man himself, and not in the ‘regionibus Coeli’-are now glorifying, as something which enables man to save his own soul without the interference of ‘The Deity’-indeed, whether ‘The Deity’ chooses or not.”

“Do leave these poor Emersonians alone for a few minutes, and tell me how you can reconcile what you have just said with your own dialogue.”