foolish or perhaps abominable?"

"I pity them, with all my heart."

"And with very good reason. You are an orphan and what its parents are
to a child the divinity is to every member of the human race. In this
Gorgo, and I, and many others whom you call heathen, feel exactly as you
do; but you--have you ever asked yourself why and how it is that you, to
whom life has been so bitter, have such a perfect conviction that there
is a benevolent divinity who rules the world and your own fate to kindly
ends? Why, in short, do you believe in a God?"

"I?" said Ague, looking puzzled, but straight into his face. "How could
anything exist without God? You ask such strange questions. All I can
see was created by our Father in Heaven."

"But there are men born blind who nevertheless believe in Him."

"They feel Him just as I see Him."

"Nay you should say: 'As I believe that I see and feel Him.' But I, for
my part, think that the intellect has a right to test what the soul only
divines, and that it must be a real happiness to see this divination
proved by well-founded arguments, and thus transformed to certainty. Did
you ever hear of Plato, the philosopher?"

"Yes, Karnis often speaks of him when he and Orpheus are discussing
things which I do not understand."

"Well, Plato, by his intellect, worked out the proof of the problem
which our feelings alone are so capable of apprehending rightly. Listen
to me: If you stand on a spit of land at the entrance to a harbor and
see a ship in the distance sailing towards you--a ship which carefully
avoids the rocks, and makes straight for the shelter of the port--are
you not justified in concluding that there is, on board that ship, a man
who guides and steers it? Certainly. You not only may, but must infer
that it is directed by a pilot. And if you look up at the sky and
contemplate the well-ordered courses of the stars--when you see how
everything on earth, great and small, obeys eternal laws and unerringly
tends to certain preordained ends and issues, you may and must infer the
existence of a ruling hand. Whose then but that of the Great Pilot of
the universe--the Almighty Godhead.--Do you like my illustration?"

"Very much. But it only proves what I knew before."

"Nevertheless, you must, I think, be pleased to find it so beautifully
expressed."

"Certainly."

"And must admire the wise man who thought out the comparison.
Yes?--Well, that man again was one of those whom you cal