wards'--there goes the ball, up again!--and who
find comfort in doing so. Do you know that many men believe that the
universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still
slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard,
guide and lend grace to the lives of men?"

"Oh! yes, I have been obliged to hear many such blasphemous things in
Rome!"

"And they ran off you like water off the silvery sheen of that swan's
plumage as he dips and raises his neck. Those who deny a God are, in your
estimation, foolish or perhaps abominable?"

"I pity them, with all my heart."

"And with very good reason. You are an orphan and what its parents are to
a child the divinity is to every member of the human race. In this Gorgo,
and I, and many others whom you call heathen, feel exactly as you do; but
you--have you ever asked yourself why and how it is that you, to whom
life has been so bitter, have such a perfect conviction that there is a
benevolent divinity who rules the world and your own fate to kindly ends?
Why, in short, do you believe in a God?"

"I?" said Ague, looking puzzled, but straight into his face. "How could
anything exist without God? You ask such strange questions. All I can see
was created by our Father in Heaven."

"But there are men born blind who nevertheless believe in Him."

"They feel Him just as I see Him."

"Nay you should say: 'As I believe that I see and feel Him.' But I, for
my part, think that the intellect has a right to test what the soul only
divines, and that it must be a real happiness to see this divination
proved by well-founded arguments, and thus transformed to certainty. Did
you ever hear of Plato, the philosopher?"

"Yes, Karnis often speaks of him when he and Orpheus are discussing
things which I do not understand."

"Well, Plato, by his intellect, worked out the proof of the problem which
our feelings alone are so capable of apprehending rightly. Listen to me:
If you stand on a spit of land at the entrance to a harbor and see a ship
in the distance sailing towards you--a ship which carefully avoids the
rocks, and makes straight for the shelter of the port--are you not
justified in concluding that there is, on board that ship, a man who
guides and steers it? Certainly. You not only may, but must infer that it
is directed by a pilot. And if you look up at the sky and contemplate the
well-ordered courses of the stars--when you see how everything on ea