s, that
this fellow, passing by my shop the other day, and seeing me employed on
a statue of Minerva, told me with a frown that, had it been marble, he
would have broken it; but the bronze was too strong for him. "Break a
goddess!" said I. "A goddess!" answered the atheist; "it is a demon--an
evil spirit!" Then he passed on his way cursing. Are such things to be
borne? What marvel that the earth heaved so fearfully last night,
anxious to reject the atheist from her bosom?--An atheist, do I say?
worse still--a scorner of the Fine Arts! Woe to us fabricants of bronze,
if such fellows as this give the law to society!'

'These are the incendiaries that burnt Rome under Nero,' groaned the
jeweller.

While such were the friendly remarks provoked by the air and faith of
the Nazarene, Olinthus himself became sensible of the effect he was
producing; he turned his eyes round, and observed the intent faces of
the accumulating throng, whispering as they gazed; and surveying them
for a moment with an expression, first of defiance and afterwards of
compassion, he gathered his cloak round him and passed on, muttering
audibly, 'Deluded idolaters!--did not last night's convulsion warn ye?
Alas! how will ye meet the last day?'

The crowd that heard these boding words gave them different
interpretations, according to their different shades of ignorance and of
fear; all, however, concurred in imagining them to convey some awful
imprecation. They regarded the Christian as the enemy of mankind; the
epithets they lavished upon him, of which 'Atheist' was the most favored
and frequent, may serve, perhaps, to warn us, believers of that same
creed now triumphant, how we indulge the persecution of opinion Olinthus
then underwent, and how we apply to those whose notions differ from our
own the terms at that day lavished on the fathers of our faith.

As Olinthus stalked through the crowd, and gained one of the more
private places of egress from the forum, he perceived gazing upon him a
pale and earnest countenance, which he was not slow to recognize.

Wrapped in a pallium that partially concealed his sacred robes, the
young Apaecides surveyed the disciple of that new and mysterious creed,
to which at one time he had been half a convert.

'Is he, too, an impostor? Does this man, so plain and simple in life,
in garb, in mien--does he too, like Arbaces, make austerity the robe of
the sensualist? Does the veil of Vesta hide the vices of th