y by the breathing of material
air, the eating of material food? Or even, if the physicists were right,
and the soul were but a material product or energy of the nerves, and
the sole law of the universe the laws of matter, then was not magic
even more probable, more rational? Was it not fair by every analogy
to suppose that there might be other, higher beings than ourselves,
obedient to those laws, and therefore possible to be attracted, even as
human beings were, by the baits of material sights and sounds?.... If
spirit pervaded all things, then was magic probable; if nothing but
matter had existence, magic was morally certain. All that remained in
either case was the test of experience.... And had not that test been
applied in every age, and asserted to succeed? What more rational, more
philosophic action than to try herself those methods and ceremonies
which she was assured on every hand had never failed but through the
ignorance or unfitness of the neophyte?.... Abamnon must be right....
She dared not think him wrong; for if this last hope failed, what was
there left but to eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?

CHAPTER XXVI: MIRIAM'S PLOT

He who has worshipped a woman, even against his will and conscience,
knows well how storm may follow storm, and earthquake earthquake, before
his idol be utterly overthrown. And so Philammon found that evening,
as he sat pondering over the strange chances of the day; for, as he
pondered, his old feelings towards Hypatia began, in spite of the
struggles of his conscience and reason, to revive within him. Not only
pure love of her great loveliness, the righteous instinct which bids us
welcome and honour beauty, whether in man or woman, as something of
real worth--divine, heavenly, ay, though we know not how, in a most deep
sense eternal; which makes our reason give the lie to all merely logical
and sentimental maunderings of moralists about 'the fleeting hues of
this our painted clay'; telling men, as the old Hebrew Scriptures tell
them, that physical beauty is the deepest of all spiritual symbols;
and that though beauty without discretion be the jewel of gold in the
swine's snout, yet the jewel of gold it is still, the sacrament of an
inward beauty, which ought to be, perhaps hereafter may be, fulfilled
in spirit and in truth. Not only this, which whispered to him--and
who shall say that the whisper was of the earth, or of the lower
world?--'She is too beautiful to be utterl