ver with the Lord.'

"Demariste stood straight upright as she spoke, and the light in her
transfigured her countenance as the sun penetrating a grey mass of vapour
informs it with such an intensity of brightness that the eye can scarcely
endure it. It was a totally new experience to Charmides, an entire
novelty in Rome. He did not venture to look in her face directly, for he
felt that there was nothing in him equal to its sublime, solemn pleading.

"'I do not know anything of your Jesus,' he said at last, timidly; 'upon
what do you rest His claims?'

"'Read His life. I will lend it to you; you will want no other evidence
for Him. And was He not raised from the dead to reign for ever at His
Father's right hand? No, keep the letter for a little while, and perhaps
you will understand it better when you know upon what it is based.'

"A day or two afterwards the manuscript was sent to him secretly with
many precautions. He was not smitten suddenly by it. The Palestinian
tale, although he confessed it was much more to his mind than Paul, was
still _rude_. It was once more the rudeness which was repellent, and
which almost outweighed the pathos of many of the episodes and the
undeniable grandeur of the trial and death. Moreover, it was full of
superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide. He was in
his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he
was carving. The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced
sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of
the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for
meddling with it. He opened his Lucretius. Here was order and sequence;
he knew where he was; he was at home. Was all this nought, were the
accumulated labour and thought of centuries to be set aside and trampled
on by the crude, frantic inspiration of clowns? The girl's face,
however, recurred to him; he could not get rid of it, and he opened the
biography again. He stumbled upon what now stand as our twenty-third and
twenty-fourth chapters of Matthew, containing the denunciation of the
Pharisees, and the prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man. He was
amazed at the new turn which was given to life, at the reasons assigned
for the curses which were dealt to these Jewish doctors. They were
damned for their lack of mercy, judgment, faith, for their extortion,
excess, and because they were full of hypocrisy and iniquity. They w