"Quite right. He was thinking, no doubt, of the miracle-monger of Tyana,
Apollonius, who certainly had heard of the doctrine of the Redeemer. But
among the thousand nine hundred and ninety, who here bring beasts to the
altar, who ever remembers this? Quite lately I heard one of our garden
laborers ask how much a day he ought to sacrifice to the sun, his god. I
told him a keration--for that is what the poor creature earns for a whole
day's work. He thought that too much, for he must live; so the god must
be content with a tithe, for the taxes to the State on his earnings were
hardly more."

"The divinity ought no doubt to be above all else to us," Melissa
observed. "But when your laborer worships the sun, and looks for its
benefits, what is the difference between him and you, or me, or any of
us, though we call the sun Helios or Serapis, or what not?"

"Yes, yes," replied Andreas. "The sun is adored here under many different
names and forms, and your Serapis has swallowed up not only Zeus and
Pluto, but Phoebus Apollo and the Egyptian Osiris and Ammon, and Ra, to
swell his own importance. But to be serious, child, our fathers made to
themselves many gods indeed, of the sublime phenomena and powers of
Nature, and worshiped them admiringly; but to us only the names remain,
and those who offer to Apollo never think of the sun. With my laborer,
who is an Arab, it is different. He believes the light-giving globe
itself to be a god; and you, I perceive, do not think him wholly wrong.
But when you see a youth throw the discus with splendid strength, do you
praise the discus, or the thrower?"

"The thrower," replied Melissa. "But Phoebus Apollo himself guides his
chariot with his divine hands."

"And astronomers," the Christian went on, "can calculate for years to
come exactly where his steeds will be at each minute of the time. So no
one can be more completely a slave than he to whom so many mortals pray
that he will, of his own free-will, guide circumstances to suit them. I,
therefore, regard the sun as a star, like any other star; and worship
should be given, not to those rolling spheres moving across the sky in
prescribed paths, but to Him who created them and guides them by fixed
laws. I really pity your Apollo and the whole host of the Olympian gods,
since the world has become possessed by the mad idea that the gods and
daimons may be moved, or even compelled, by forms of prayer and
sacrifices and magic arts, to grant