aces which He occupied during creation,
reduced to the base necessity of making room for His own universe, and
endure the suffering--for the analogy of all material nature tells us
that it is suffering--of a foreign body, like a thorn within the flesh,
subsisting within His own substance? Rather believe that His wisdom and
splendour, like a subtle and piercing fire, insinuates itself eternally
with resistless force through every organised atom, and that were it
withdrawn but for an instant from the petal of the meanest flower, gross
matter, and the dead chaos from which it was formed, would be all which
would remain of its loveliness....

'Yes'--she went on, after the method of her school, who preferred,
like most decaying ones, harangues to dialectic, and synthesis to
induction.... 'Look at yon lotus-flower, rising like Aphrodite from
the wave in which it has slept throughout the night, and saluting, with
bending swan-neck, that sun which it will follow lovingly around the
sky. Is there no more there than brute matter, pipes and fibres, colour
and shape, and the meaningless life-in-death which men call vegetation?
Those old Egyptian priests knew better, who could see in the number and
the form of those ivory petals and golden stamina, in that mysterious
daily birth out of the wave, in that nightly baptism, from which it
rises each morning re-born to a new life, the signs of some divine idea,
some mysterious law, common to the flower itself, to the white-robed
priestess who held it in the temple rites, and to the goddess to whom
they both were consecrated.... The flower of Isis!.... Ah!--well. Nature
has her sad symbols, as well as her fair ones. And in proportion as
a misguided nation has forgotten the worship of her to whom they owed
their greatness, for novel and barbaric superstitions, so has her sacred
flower grown rarer and more rare, till now--fit emblem of the worship
over which it used to shed its perfume--it is only to be found in
gardens such as these--a curiosity to the vulgar, and, to such as me, a
lingering monument of wisdom and of glory past away.'

Philammon, it may be seen, was far advanced by this time; for he bore
the allusions to Isis without the slightest shudder. Nay--he dared even
to offer consolation to the beautiful mourner.

'The philosopher,' he said, 'will hardly lament the loss of a mere
outward idolatry. For if, as you seem to think, there were a root of
spiritual truth in the symbolism