ndles their passion, but the
passion is the instrument they use; they force themselves into men's
hearts, while they appear only to appeal to their judgment. Nothing is
so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of
Orpheus--it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of
sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

Olinthus did not then suffer Apaecides thus easily to escape him. He
overtook and addressed him thus:

'I do not wonder, Apaecides, that I distress you; that I shake all the
elements of your mind: that you are lost in doubt; that you drift here
and there in the vast ocean of uncertain and benighted thought. I
wonder not at this, but bear with me a little; watch and pray--the
darkness shall vanish, the storm sleep, and God Himself, as He came of
yore on the seas of Samaria, shall walk over the lulled billows, to the
delivery of your soul. Ours is a religion jealous in its demands, but
how infinitely prodigal in its gifts! It troubles you for an hour, it
repays you by immortality.'

'Such promises,' said Apaecides, sullenly, 'are the tricks by which man
is ever gulled. Oh, glorious were the promises which led me to the
shrine of Isis!'

'But,' answered the Nazarene, 'ask thy reason, can that religion be
sound which outrages all morality? You are told to worship your gods.
What are those gods, even according to yourselves? What their actions,
what their attributes? Are they not all represented to you as the
blackest of criminals? yet you are asked to serve them as the holiest of
divinities. Jupiter himself is a parricide and an adulterer. What are
the meaner deities but imitators of his vices? You are told not to
murder, but you worship murderers; you are told not to commit adultery,
and you make your prayers to an adulterer! Oh! what is this but a
mockery of the holiest part of man's nature, which is faith? Turn now
to the God, the one, the true God, to whose shrine I would lead you. If
He seem to you too sublime, two shadowy, for those human associations,
those touching connections between Creator and creature, to which the
weak heart clings--contemplate Him in His Son, who put on mortality like
ourselves. His mortality is not indeed declared, like that of your
fabled gods, by the vices of our nature, but by the practice of all its
virtues. In Him are united the austerest morals with the tenderest
affections. If He were but a mere man, H