w
the place assigned to him to dwell in with snares and traps, or implant
in his breast a hundred impulses of which the gratification only drags
him into an abyss? Is that Being my friend, who suffers me to be born
and to grow up, and leaves me tied to the martyr's stake, with very few
real joys, and finally kills me, innocent or guilty, as surely as I am
born? If the divinity which is supposed to bestow on us a portion of the
divine essence in the form of reason were constituted as the crowd
are taught to believe, there could be nothing on earth but wisdom and
goodness; but the majority are fools or wicked, and the good are like
tall trees, which the lightning blasts rather than the creeping weed.
Titianus falls before the dancer Theocritus, the noble Papinian before
the murderer Caracalla, our splendid Alexander before such a wretch as
Zminis; and divine reason lets it all happen, and allows human reason
to proclaim the law. Happiness is for fools and knaves; for those
who cherish and uphold reason--ay, reason, which is a part of the
divinity--persecution, misery, and despair."

"Have done!" Melissa exclaimed. "Have the judgments of the immortals not
fallen hardly enough on us? Would you provoke them to discharge their
fury in some more dreadful manner?"

At this the skeptic struck his breast with defiant pride, exclaiming:
"I do not fear them, and dare to proclaim openly the conclusions of
my thoughts. There are no gods! There is no rational guidance of the
universe. It has arisen self-evolved, by chance; and if a god created
it, he laid down eternal laws and has left them to govern its course
without mercy or grace, and without troubling himself about the puling
of men who creep about on the face of the earth like the ants on that of
a pumpkin. And well for us that it should be so! Better a thousand times
is it to be the servant of an iron law, than the slave of a capricious
master who takes a malignant and envious pleasure in destroying the
best!"

"And this, you say, is the final outcome of your thoughts?" asked
Melissa, shaking her head sadly. "Do you not perceive that such an
outbreak of mad despair is simply unworthy of your own wisdom, of
which the end and aim should be a passionless, calm, and immovable
moderation?"

"And do they show such moderation," Philip gasped out, "who pour the
poison of misfortune in floods on one tortured heart?"

"Then you can accuse those whose existence you disbelieve in?" r