of life that is useful and beneficent.

Religious mania is a result of dwelling on a borrowed religion. If let
alone no man would become insane on religious topics, for the religion
he would evolve would be one of joy, laughter and love, not one of
misery or horror. The religion that contemplates misery and woe is one
devised by priestcraft for a purpose, and that purpose is to rule and
rob. From the blunt ways of the road we get a polite system of
intimidation which makes the man pay. It is robbery reduced to a system,
and finally piously believed in by the robbers, who are hypnotized into
the belief that they are doing God's service.

"All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted
by self-respecting persons as final," said Theon to Hypatia. "Reserve
your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to
think at all."

Theon gave lectures, and had private classes in esoterics, wherein the
innermost secrets of divinity were imparted. Also, he had a plan for the
transmutation of metals and a recipe for perpetual youth. When he had
nothing else to do, he played games with his daughter.

At twenty-one Hypatia had mastered the so-called art of Rhetoric, or the
art of expression by vocal speech.

It will be remembered that the Romans considered rhetoric, or the art of
the rhetor, or orator, as first in importance. To impress people by your
personal presence they regarded as the gift of gifts.

This idea seems to have been held by the polite world up to the Italian
Renaissance, when the art of printing was invented and the written word
came to be regarded as more important than the spoken. One lives, and
the other dies on the air, existing only in memory, growing attenuated
and diluted as it is transferred. The revival of sculpture and painting
also helped oratory to take its proper place as one of the polite arts,
and not a thing to be centered upon to the exclusion of all else.

Theon set out to produce a perfect human being; and whether his charts,
theorems and formulas made up a complete law of eugenics, or whether it
was dumb luck, this we know: he nearly succeeded. Hypatia was five feet
nine, and weighed one hundred thirty-five pounds. This when she was
twenty. She could walk ten miles without fatigue; swim, row, ride
horseback and climb mountains. Through a series of gentle calisthenics
invented by her father, combined with breathing exercises, she had
developed a body o