d the stranger, with a smile. "He is an old
acquaintance of mine. And I must say he is very consistent--except in
paying a visit to Jerusalem. That does surprise me. He said to me the
other night the same things as he said to me at Rome many years ago. He
would revive the worship of Nature. The deities whom he so eloquently
describes and so exquisitely delineates are the ideal personifications
of the most eminent human qualities, and chiefly the physical. Physical
beauty is his standard of excellence, and he has a fanciful theory that
moral order would be the consequence of the worship of physical beauty;
for without moral order he holds physical beauty cannot be maintained.
But the answer to Mr. Phoebus is, that his system has been tried and has
failed, and under conditions more favorable than are likely to exist
again; the worship of Nature ended in the degradation of the
human race."

"But Mr. Phoebus cannot really believe in Apollo and Venus," said
Lothair. "These are phrases. He is, I suppose, what is called a
Pantheist."

"No doubt the Olympus of Mr. Phoebus is the creation of his easel,"
replied the Syrian. "I should not, however, describe him as a Pantheist,
whose creed requires more abstraction than Mr. Phoebus, the worshiper of
Nature, would tolerate. His school never care to pursue any
investigation which cannot be followed by the eye--and the worship of
the beautiful always ends in an orgy. As for Pantheism, it is Atheism in
domino. The belief in a Creator who is unconscious of creating is more
monstrous than any dogma of any of the churches in this city, and we
have them all here."

"But there are people now who tell you that there never was any
creation, and therefore there never could have been a Creator,"
said Lothair.

"And which is now advanced with the confidence of novelty," said the
Syrian, "though all of it has been urged, and vainly urged, thousands of
years ago. There must be design, or all we see would be without sense,
and I do not believe in the unmeaning. As for the natural forces to
which all creation is now attributed, we know they are unconscious,
while consciousness is as inevitable a portion of our existence as the
eye or the hand. The conscious cannot be derived from the unconscious.
Man is divine."

"I wish I could assure myself of the personality of the Creator," said
Lothair. "I cling to that, but they say it is unphilosophical."

"In what sense?" asked the Syrian. "Is it mor