ministers are robed in purple and fine linen, and | humour: for, if they are poor themselves, they fare sumptuously every day. Timotheus. I have hopes of you now. Timotheus. Because you have repeated those blessed words, which are only to be found in our scriptures. Lucian. There indeed I found them. But I also found in the same volume words of the same speaker, declaring that the rich shall never see his face in heaven. Timotheus. He does not always mean what you think he does. Lucian. How is this? Did he then direct his discourses to none but men more intelligent than I am? Timotheus. Unless he gave you understanding for the occasion, they might mislead you. Lucian. Indeed! Timotheus. Unquestionably. For instance, he tells us to take no heed of to-morrow: he tells us to share equally all our worldly goods: but we know that we can not be respected unless we bestow due care on our possessions, and that not only the vulgar but the well-educated esteem us in proportion to the gifts of fortune. Lucian. The eclectic philosophy is most flourish ing among you Christians. You take whatever suits your appetites, and reject the rest. Timotheus. We are not half so rich as the priests of Isis. Give us their possessions; and we will not sit idle as they do, but be able and ready to do incalculable good to our fellow-creatures. Lucian. I have never seen great possessions excite to great alacrity. Usually they enfeeble the sympathies, and often overlie and smother them. Timotheus. Our religion is founded less on sympathies than on miracles. Cousin! you smile most when you ought to be most serious. Lucian. I was smiling at the thought of one whom I would recommend to your especial notice, as soon as you disinherit the priests of Isis. He may perhaps be refractory; for he pretends (the knave!) to work miracles. Timotheus. Impostor! who is he? Lucian. Aulus of Pelusium. Idle and dissolute, he never gained anything honestly but a scourging, if indeed he ever made, what he long merited, this acquisition. Unable to run into debt where he was known, he came over to Alexandria. Timotheus. I know him: I know him well. Here, of his own accord, he has betaken himself to a new and regular life. Lucian. He will presently wear it out, or make it sit easier on his shoulders. My metaphor brings me to my story. Having nothing to carry with him beside an empty valise, he resolved on filling it with somewhat, however worthless, lest, seeing his utter destitution, and hopeless of payment, a receiver of lodgers should refuse to admit him into the hostelry. Accordingly, he went to a tailor's, and began to joke about his poverty. Nothing is more apt to bring people into good enjoy the pleasure of discovering that others are no better off; and, if not poor, there is the consciousness of superiority. "The favour I am about to ask of a man so wealthy and so liberal as you are," said Aulus, "is extremely small: you can materially serve me, without the slightest loss, hazard, or inconvenience. In few words, my valise is empty and to some ears an empty valise is louder and more discordant than a bagpipe: I can not say I like the sound of it myself. Give me all the shreds and snippings you can spare me. They will feel like clothes; not exactly so to me and my person, but to those who are inquisitive, and who may be importunate." The tailor laughed, and distended both arms of Aulus with his munificence. Soon was the valise well filled and rammed down. Plenty of boys were in readiness to carry it to the boat. Aulus waved them off, looking at some angrily, at others suspiciously. Boarding the skiff, he lowered his treasure with care and caution, staggering a little at the weight, and shaking it gently on deck, with his ear against it: and then, finding all safe and compact, he sate on it; but as tenderly as a pullet on her first eggs. When he was landed, his care was even greater, and whoever came near him was warned off with loud vociferations. Anxiously as the other passengers were invited by the innkeepers to give their houses the preference, Aulus was importuned most the others were only beset; he was borne off in triumphant captivity. He ordered a bedroom, and carried his valise with him; he ordered a bath, and carried with him his valise. He started up from the company at dinner, struck his forehead, and cried out, "Where is my valise?" "We are honest men here:" replied the host. "You have left it, sir, in your chamber: where else indeed should you leave it?" "Honesty is seated on your brow," exclaimed Aulus: "but there are few to be trusted in the world we live in. I now believe I can eat." And he gave a sure token of the belief that was in him, not without a start now and then and a finger at his ear, as if he heard somebody walking in the direction of his bed-chamber. Now began his first miracle for now he contrived to pick up, from time to time, a little money. In the presence of his host and fellow-lodgers, he threw a few obols, negligently and indifferently, among the beggars. These poor creatures," said he, "know a new comer as well as the gnats do: in one half-hour I am half-ruined by them; and this daily." Nearly a month had elapsed since his arrival, and no account of board and lodging had been delivered or called for. Suspicion at length arose in the host whether he really was rich. When another man's honesty is doubted, the doubter's is sometimes in jeopardy. The host was tempted to unsew the valise. To his amazement and horror he found only shreds within it. However, he was determined to be cautious, and to consult his wife, who, although a Christian like Aulus, and much edified by his discourses, might dissent from him in regard to a community of goods, at least in her own household, and might defy him to prove by any authority that the doctrine was meant for innkeepers. Aulus, on his return in the evening, found out that his valise had been opened. He hurried back, threw its contents into the canal, and, borrowing an old cloak, he tucked it up under his dress, and returned. Nobody had seen him enter or come back again, nor was it immediately that his host or hostess were willing to appear. But, after he had called them loudly for some time, they entered his apartment: and he thus addressed the woman. "O Eucharis! no words are requisite to convince you (firm as you are in the faith) of eternal verities, however mysterious. But your unhappy husband has betrayed his incredulity in regard to the most awful. If my prayers, offered up in our holy temples all day long, have been heard, and that they have been heard I feel within me the blessed certainty, something miraculous has been vouchsafed for the conversion of this miserable sinner. Until the present hour, the valise before you was filled with precious relics from the apparel of saints and martyrs, fresh as when on them." "True, by Jove!" said the husband to himself. "Within the present hour," continued Aulus, they are united into one raiment, signifying our own union, our own restoration." He drew forth the cloak, and fell on his face. Eucharis fell also, and kissed the saintly head prostrate before her. The host's eyes were opened, and he bewailed his hardness of heart. Aulus is now occupied in strengthening his faith, not without an occasional support to the wife's: all three live together in unity. Timotheus. And do you make a joke even of this? Will you never cease from the habitude? Lucian. Too soon. The farther we descend into the vale of years, the fewer illusions accompany us: we have little inclination, little time, for jocularity and laughter. Light things are easily detached from us, and we shake off heavier as we can. Instead of levity, we are liable to moroseness: for always near the grave there are more briars than flowers, unless we plant them ourselves, or our friends supply them. Timotheus. Thinking thus, do you continue to dissemble or to distort the truth? The shreds are become a cable for the faithful. That they were miraculously turned into one entire garment who shall gainsay? How many hath it already clothed with righteousness! Happy men, casting their doubts away before it! Who knows, O cousin Lucian, but on some future day you your self will invoke the merciful interposition of Aulus ! how ungenerous! how hardened in unbelief! Reason is a bladder on which you may paddle like a child as you swim in summer waters: but, when the winds rise and the waves roughen, it slips from under you, and you sink: yes, O Lucian, you sink into a gulf whence you never can emerge. Lucian. I deem those the wisest who exert the soonest their own manly strength, now with the stream and now against it, enjoying the exercise in fine weather, venturing out in foul, if need be, yet avoiding not only rocks and whirlpools, but also shallows. In such a light, my cousin, I look on your dispensations. I shut them out as we shut out winds blowing from the desert; hot, debilitating, oppressive, laden with impalpable sands and pungent salts, and inflicting an incurable blindness. Timotheus. Well, cousin Lucian! I can bear all you say while you are not witty. Let me bid you farewell in this happy interval. Lucian. Is it not serious and sad, O my cousin, that what the Deity hath willed to lie incomprehensible in his mysteries, we should fall upon with tooth and nail, and ferociously growl over, or ignorantly dissect ? Timotheus. Ho! now you come to be serious and sad, there are hopes of you. Truth always begins or ends so. Lucian. Undoubtedly. But I think it more reverential to abstain from that which, with whatever effort, I should never understand. Timotheus. You are lukewarm, my cousin, you are lukewarm. A most dangerous state. Lucian. For milk to continue in, not for men. I would not fain be frozen or scalded. Timotheus. Alas! you are blind, my sweet cousin! Lucian. Well; do not open my eyes with pincers, nor compose for them a collyrium of spurge. May not men eat and drink and talk together, and perform in relation one to another all the duties of social life, whose opinions are different on things immediately under their eyes? If they can and do, surely they may as easily on things equally above the comprehension of each party. The wisest and most virtuous man in the whole extent of the Roman empire is Plutarch of Cheronæa: yet Plutarch holds a firm belief in the existence of I know not how many gods, every one of whom has committed notorious misdemeanors. The nearest to the Cheronæan in virtue and wisdom is Trajan, who holds all the gods dog-cheap. These two men are friends. If either of them were influenced by your religion, as inculcated and practised by the priesthood, he would be the enemy of the other, and wisdom and virtue would plead for the delinquent in vain. When your religion had existed, as you tell us, about a century, Caius Cæcilius,* of Novum Comum, was Proconsul in Bithynia. *The younger Pliny. D Trajan, worst. Never was he in so little mischief as when he was murdering his friends. Timotheus. Yet he built this very city; a noble and opulent one when Rome was of hurdles and the mildest and most equitable of mankind, desirous to remove from them, as far as might be, the hatred and invectives of those whose old religion was assailed by them, applied to Cæcilius for information on their behaviour as good citi-rushes. zens. The reply of Cæcilius was favourable. Had Lucian. He built it! I wish, O Timotheus! he had Trajan applied to the most eminent and authori- been as well employed as the stone-cutters or the tative of the sect, they would certainly have plasterers. No, no: the wisest of architects planned brought into jeopardy all who differed in one tittle the most beautiful and commodious of cities, by from any point of their doctrine or discipline. For which, under a rational government and equitable the thorny and bitter aloe of dissension required laws, Africa might have been civilised to the less than a century to flower on the steps of your centre, and the palm have extended her conquests temple. through the remotest desert. Instead of which, a dozen of Macedonian thieves rifled a dying drunkard and murdered his children. In process of time, another drunkard reeled hitherward from Rome, made an easy mistake in mistaking a palace for a brothel, permitted a stripling boy to beat him soundly, and a serpent to receive the last caresses of his paramour. Timotheus. You are already half a Christian, in exposing to the world the vanities both of philosophy and of power. Lucian. I have done no such thing: I have exposed the vanities of the philosophising and the powerful. Philosophy is admirable; and Power may be glorious: the one conduces to truth, the other has nearly all the means of conferring peace and happiness, but it usually, and indeed almost always, takes a contrary direction. I have ridiculed the futility of speculative minds, only when they would pave the clouds instead of the streets. To see distant things better than near, is a certain proof of a defective sight. The people I have held in derision never turn their eyes to what they can see, but direct them continually where nothing is to be seen. And this, by their disciples, is called the sublimity of speculation! There is little merit acquired, or force exhibited, in blowing off a feather that would settle on my nose and this is all I have done in regard to the philosophers but I claim for myself the approbation of humanity, in having shown the true dimensions of the great. The highest of them are no higher than my tunic; but they are high enough to trample on the necks of those wretches who throw themselves on the ground before them. Timotheus. Was Alexander of Macedon no are persuaded to corrupt us. higher? : Lucian. What region of the earth, what city, what theatre, what library, what private study, hath he enlightened? If you are silent, I may well be. It is neither my philosophy nor your religion which casts the blood and bones of men in their faces, and insists on the most reverence for those who have made the most unhappy. If the Romans scourged by the hands of children the schoolmaster who would have betrayed them, how greatly more deserving of flagellation, from the same quarter, are those hundreds of pedagogues who deliver up the intellects of youth to such immoral revellers and mad murderers! They would punish a thirsty child for purloining a bunch of grapes from a vineyard, and the same men on the same day would insist on his reverence for the subverter of Tyre, the plunderer of Babylon, and the incendiary of Persepolis. And are these men teachers? are these men philosophers? are these men priests? Of all the curses that ever afflicted the earth, I think Alexander was the Shame upon historians and pedagogues for exciting the worst passions of youth by the display of such false glories! If your religion hath any truth or influence, her professors will extinguish the promontory lights, which only allure to breakers. They will be assiduous in teaching the young and ardent that great abilities do not constitute great men, without the right and unremitting application of them; and that, in the sight of Humanity and Wisdom, it is better to erect one cottage than to demolish a hundred cities. Down to the present day we have been taught little else than falsehood. We have been told to do this thing and that we have been told we shall be punished unless we do but at the same time we are shown by the finger that prosperity and glory, and the esteem of all about us, rest upon other and very different foundations. Now, do the ears or the eyes seduce the most easily and lead the most directly to the heart? But both eyes and ears are won over, and alike Timotheus. Cousin Lucian, I was leaving you with the strangest of all notions in my head. I began to think for a moment that you doubted my sincerity in the religion I profess; and that a man of your admirable good sense, and at your advanced age, could reject that only sustenance which supports us through the grave into eternal life. Lucian. I am the most docile and practicable of men, and never reject what people set before me: for if it is bread, it is good for my own use; │ if bone or bran, it will do for my dog or mule. But, although you know my weakness and facility, it is unfair to expect I should have admitted at once what the followers, and personal friends of your Master, for a long time hesitated to receive. I remember to have read in one of the early commentators, that his disciples themselves* could not swallow the miracle of the loaves; and one who wrote more recently says, that even his brethren did not believe in him. Timotheus. Yet finally, when they have looked | over each other's accounts, they cast them up, and make them all tally in the main sum; and if one omits an article, the next supplies its place with a commodity of the same value. What would you have? But it is of little use to argue on religion with a man who, professing his readiness to believe, and even his credulity, yet disbelieves in miracles. Lucian. I should be obstinate and perverse if I disbelieved in the existence of a thing for no better reason than because I never saw it, and can not understand its operations. Do you believe, O Timotheus, that Perictione, the mother of Plato, became his mother by the sole agency of Apollo's divine spirit, under the phantasm of that god? Timotheus. I indeed believe such absurdities! Lucian. You touch me on a vital part if you call an absurdity the religion, or philosophy in which I was educated. Anaxalides, and Clearagus, and Speusippus, his own nephew, assert it. Who should know better than they? Timotheus. Where are their proofs ? Lucian. I would not be so indelicate as to require them on such an occasion. A short time ago I conversed with an old centurion, who was in service by the side of Vespasian, when Titus, and many officers and soldiers of the army, and many captives, were present, and who saw one Eleazar put a ring to the nostril of a demoniac (as the patient was called) and draw the demon out of it. Timotheus. And do you pretend to believe this nonsense? Lucian. I only believe that Vespasian and Titus had nothing to gain or accomplish by the miracle; and that Eleazar, if he had been detected in a trick by two acute men and several thousand enemies, had nothing to look forward to but a cross; the only piece of upholstery for which Judea seems to have either wood or workmen, and which are as common in that country as direction-posts are in any other. believed, as nearly all nations do, in different ranks and orders of superhuman beings: and perhaps he thought (but I never was in his confidence or counsels) that the higher were rather in communication with the next to them in intellectual faculties, than with the most remote. To me the suggestion appears by no means irrational, that, if we are managed or cared for at all, by beings wiser than ourselves (which in truth would be no sign of any great wisdom in them), it can only be by such as are very far from perfection, and who indulge us in the commission of innumerable faults and follies, for their own speculation or amusement. Timotheus. There is only one such; and he is the Devil. Lucian. If he delights in our wickedness, which you believe, he must be incomparably the happiest of beings, which you do not believe. No god of Epicurus rests his elbow on his armchair with less energetic exertion or discomposure. Timotheus. We lead holier and purer lives than such ignorant mortals as are not living under Grace. Lucian. I also live under Grace, O Timotheus! and I venerate her for the pleasures I have received at her hands. I do not believe she has quite deserted me. If my grey hairs are unattractive to her, and if the trace of her fingers is lost in the wrinkles of my forehead, still I sometimes am told it is discernible even on the latest and coldest of my writings. Timotheus. You are wilful in misapprehension. The Grace of which I speak is adverse to pleasure and impurity. Lucian. Rightly do you separate impurity and pleasure, which indeed soon fly asunder when the improvident would unite them. But never believe that tenderness of heart signifies corruption of morals, if you happen to find it (which indeed is unlikely) in the direction you have taken: on the contrary, no two qualities are oftener found together, on mind as on matter, than hard Timotheus. The Jews are a stiff-necked people. ness and lubricity. Believe me, cousin Timotheus, when we come Timotheus. Would you, O Lucian, be classed to eighty years of age we are all Essenes. In among the atheists, like Epicurus? our kingdom of heaven there is no marrying Lucian. It lies not at my discretion what name or giving in marriage; and austerity in ourshall be given me at present or hereafter, any selves, when Nature holds over us the sharp more than it did at my birth. But I wonder at instrument with which Jupiter operated on Sathe ignorance and precipitancy of those who call turn, makes us austere to others. But how Epicurus an atheist. He saw on the same earth happens it that you, both old and young, break with himself a great variety of inferior creatures, every bond which connected you anciently with some possessing more sensibility and more the Essenes? Not only do you marry (a highth of thoughtfulness than others. Analogy would lead wisdom to which I never have attained, although so contemplative a reasoner to the conclusion, in others I commend it), but you never share that if many were inferior and in sight, others your substance with the poorest of your commumight be superior and out of sight. He never nity, as they did, nor live simply and frugally, disbelieved in the existence of the gods; he only nor purchase nor employ slaves, nor refuse rank disbelieved that they troubled their heads with and offices in the state, nor abstain from litigaour concerns. Have they none of their own? tion, nor abominate and execrate the wounds If they are happy, does their happiness depend and cruelties of war. The Essenes did all this, on us, comparatively so imbecile and vile? He and greatly more, if Josephus and Philo, whose political and religious tenets are opposite to theirs, are credible and trust-worthy. Timotheus. Doubtless you would also wish us to retire into the desert, and eschew the conversation of mankind. Lucian. No indeed; but I would wish the greater part of your people to eschew mine, for they bring all the worst of the desert with them wherever they enter; its smothering heats, its blinding sands, its sweeping suffocation. Return to the pure spirit of the Essenes, without their asceticism; cease from controversy, and drop party designations. If you will not do this, do less, and be merely what you profess to be, which is quite enough for an honest, a virtuous, and a religious man. hearted men who refuse to hear the word of the Lord. Lucian. The hard-hearted knowing this of the tender-hearted, and receiving the declaration from their own lips, will refuse to hear the word of the Lord all their lives. Timotheus. Well, well; it can not be helped. I see, cousin, my hopes of obtaining a little of your assistance in your own pleasant way are disappointed: but it is something to have conceived a better hope of saving your soul, from your readiness to acknowledge your belief in miracles. Lucian. Miracles have existed in all ages and in all religions. Witnesses to some of them have been numerous; to others of them fewer. Occasionally the witnesses have been disinterested in Timotheus. Cousin Lucian, I did not come the result. hither to receive a lecture from you. Timotheus. Now indeed you speak truly and Lucian. I have often given a dinner to a wisely. friend who did not come to dine with me. Timotheus. Then, I trust, you gave him something better for dinner than bay-salt and dandelions. If you will not assist us in nettling our enemies a little for their absurdities and impositions, let me entreat you, however, to let us alone, and to make no remarks on us. I myself run into no extravagances, like the Essenes, washing and fasting, and running into solitude. I am not called to them: when I am, I go. Lucian. But sometimes the most honest and the most quiescent have either been unable or unwilling to push themselves so forward as to see clearly and distinctly the whole of the operation; and have listened to some knave who felt a pleasure in deluding their credulity, or some other who himself was either an enthusiast or a dupe. It also may have happened in the ancient religions, of Egypt for instance, or of India, or even of Greece, that narratives have been attributed to authors who never heard of them; and have been Lucian. I am apprehensive the Lord may circulated by honest men who firmly believed afflict you with deafness in that ear. Timotheus. Nevertheless, I am indifferent to the world, and all things in it. This, I trust, you will acknowledge to be true religion and true philosophy. Lucian. That is not philosophy which betrays an indifference to those for whose benefit philosophy was designed; and those are the whole human race. But I hold it to be the most unphilosophical thing in the world, to call away men from useful occupations and mutual help, to profitless speculations and acrid controversies. Censurable enough, and contemptible too, is that supercilious philosopher, sneeringly sedate, who narrates in full and flowing periods the persecutions and tortures of a fellow-man, led astray by his credulity, and ready to die in the assertion of what in his soul he believes to be the truth. But hardly less censurable, hardly less contemptible, is the tranquilly arrogant sectarian, who denies that wisdom or honesty can exist beyond the limits of his own ill-lighted chamber. Timotheus. What is he sanguinary? : them; by half-honest, who indulged their vanity in becoming members of a novel and bustling society; and by utterly dishonest, who, having no other means of rising above the shoulders of the vulgar, threw dust into their eyes and made them stoop. Timotheus. Ha! the rogues! It is nearly all over with them. Lucian. Let us hope so. Parthenius and the Roman poet Ovidius Naso, have related the transformations of sundry men, women, and gods. Timotheus. Idleness! Idleness! I never read such lying authors. Lucian. I myself have seen enough to incline me toward a belief in them. Timotheus. You? Why! you have always been thought an utter infidel; and now you are running, hot and heedless as any mad dog, to the opposite extreme! Lucian. I have lived to see, not indeed one man, but certainly one animal turned into another: nay, great numbers. I have seen sheep with the most placid faces in the morning, one nibbling the tender herb with all its dew upon it; another, negligent of its own sustenance, and giving it copiously to the tottering lamb aside it. Timotheus. How pretty! half poetical ! Lucian. Whenever he can be, he is: and he always has it in his power to be even worse than that for he refuses his custom to the industrious and honest shopkeeper who has been taught to think differently from himself, in matters Lucian. In the heat of the day I saw the very which he has had no leisure to study, and by same sheep tearing off each other's fleeces with which, if he had enjoyed that leisure, he would long teeth and longer claws, and imitating so adhave been a less industrious and a less expert mirably the howl of wolves, that at last the wolves artificer. came down on them in a body, and lent their Timotheus. We can not countenance those hard-best assistance at the general devouring. What |