sland of Ceylon a long sometime B.
C. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--or was it Lady Hester Stanhope?--said
she had traveled all over the world, and had never found but two kinds
of people,--men and women. I fancy the same thing is true of all the
ages as well as all the countries."

"No," Adam said, shaking his head; "our ideals change. The scheme of
life laid down by Christ was to the Greeks foolishness and to the Jews
a stumbling-block, and there were plenty of Greeks and Jews in our
day. By Greeks I mean people whose ideals were purely intellectual,
and by Jews those who saw no good save a material good, no God but the
God of Mammon. They would not hear either Moses or the prophets, and
the statute of limitations was as near as they could come to the
Sabbatic year. The Greek and the Jew have stood ready with their cup
of hemlock, their crown of thorns for every Christ-spirit that has
ever come to earth. Yet more people read Socrates, and believed on the
Nazarene every year. I don't mean in the church; the working-man did
not go to church, but he uncovered his head at the name of Christ, the
first lawgiver who confounded the scribes and Pharisees, and ate with
publicans and sinners."

"But Moses was the first lawgiver to forbid taking the nether
millstone as a pledge," objected Robin.

"True," he admitted, "and the laws of Moses would have made the world
over. He was the greatest writer on political economy this earth has
ever seen. His absolute fiat against the alienation of the land would
have done more for the common people than all Adam Smith's theories of
free competition, and Fourier's dream of a perfected communism. But
who would have known of Moses, save for Christ? The Old Testament
would have been merely the sacred book of the Hebrews, and save as a
literary and historic work, of very uncertain historic value, would
have been unread, as the Koran and other books of a similar nature
were unread."

"And yet you do not believe in the divinity of Christ," she said
slowly.

"No," he answered. "Is that necessary before one can believe in his
teachings? The truth is always divine. What difference does it make
whether the one who utters it be human or divine, bond or slave, AEsop
or Marcus Aurelius? the truth remains the same. A fable is only
another name of a parable. We have the story of the lost sheep; that's
a parable; and that of the lamb that muddied the stream, and that's a
fable. One is sacred, the other