ing to make you acquainted with the religion of Iran. He will be your
spiritual, and I your secular guardian."

At these words Nitetis, who had been smiling happily, cast down her eyes
and asked in a low voice: "Am I to become unfaithful to the gods of my
fathers, who have never failed to hear my prayers? Can I, ought I to
forget them?"

"Yes," said Kassandane decidedly, "thou canst, and it is thy bounden
duty, for a wife ought to have no friends but those her husband calls
such. The gods are a man's earliest, mightiest and most faithful
friends, and it therefore becomes thy duty, as a wife, to honor them,
and to close thine heart against strange gods and superstitions, as thou
wouldst close it against strange lovers."

"And," added Croesus, "we will not rob you of your deities; we will only
give them to you under other names. As Truth remains eternally the
same, whether called 'maa', as by the Egyptians, or 'Aletheia' as by the
Greeks, so the essence of the Deity continues unchanged in all places
and times. Listen, my daughter: I myself, while still king of Lydia,
often sacrificed in sincere devotion to the Apollo of the Greeks,
without a fear that in so doing I should offend the Lydian sun-god
Sandon; the Ionians pay their worship to the Asiatic Cybele, and, now
that I have become a Persian, I raise my hands adoringly to Mithras,
Ormuzd and the lovely Anahita. Pythagoras too, whose teaching is not new
to you, worships one god only, whom he calls Apollo; because, like the
Greek sun-god, he is the source of light and of those harmonies which
Pythagoras holds to be higher than all else. And lastly, Xenophanes of
Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single
deity on high--the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence
consists of thought, reason and eternity.

[A celebrated freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent
speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the
Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived
to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some
fragments of his writings above. He committed his speculations also
to verse.]

"In this power everything has its rise, and it alone remains unchanged,
while all created matter must be continually renewed and perfected. The
ardent longing for some being above us, on whom we can lean when our own
powers fail,--the wonderful instinct which desires