ut his life has not been the more perfect on that account. Perfection
exists only in those more mechanical grades of being, in which joy is
unconscious, but also self-sufficing. To grow in consciousness is to
grow in the capability and in the desire for joy; to decline rather
than advance, in the physical power of attaining it. Man's soul
expands; his 'physical recipiency' remains for ever bounded."

"Nor are his works a source of life to him either now or for the future.
The conception of youth and strength and wisdom is not its reality: the
knowing (and depicting) what joy is, is not the possession of it. And
the surviving of his work, when he himself is dead, is but a mockery the
more."

It is all so horrible that he sometimes imagines another life, as
unlimited in capability, as this in the desire, for joy, and dreams that
Zeus has revealed it. "But he has not revealed it, and therefore it will
not be." St. Paul is preaching at this very time, and Protus sends a
letter to be forwarded to him; but Cleon does not admit that knowledge
can reside in a "barbarian Jew;" and gently rebukes his royal friend for
inclining to such doctrine, which, as he has gathered from one who heard
it, "can be held by no sane man."

Cleon constantly uses the word soul as antithesis to body: but he uses
it in its ancient rather than its modern sense, as expressing the
sentient life, not the spiritual; and this perhaps explains the anomaly
of his believing that it is independent of the lower physical powers,
and yet not destined to survive them.

The EPISTLE of Karshish is addressed to a certain Abib, the writer's
master in the science of medicine. It is written from Bethany; and the
"strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the _case_ of
Lazarus, whom Karshish has seen there. Lazarus, as he relates, has been
the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by
a too sudden awakening from it. He labours under the fixed idea that he
was raised from the dead; and that the Nazarene physician at whose
command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) was no
other than God: who for love's sake had taken human form, and worked
and died for men. Karshish regards the madness of this idea as beyond
rational doubt: but he is perplexed and haunted by its consistency: by
the manner in which this supposed vision of the Heavenly life has
transformed, even inverted the man's judgment of earthly things. He
c