, if thou hast
indeed the power!'

'I do not marvel,' answered the Nazarene, 'that thou hast thus erred, or
that thou art thus sceptic. Eighty years ago there was no assurance to
man of God, or of a certain and definite future beyond the grave. New
laws are declared to him who has ears--a heaven, a true Olympus, is
revealed to him who has eyes--heed then, and listen.'

And with all the earnestness of a man believing ardently himself, and
zealous to convert, the Nazarene poured forth to Apaecides the
assurances of Scriptural promise. He spoke first of the sufferings and
miracles of Christ--he wept as he spoke: he turned next to the glories
of the Saviour's Ascension--to the clear predictions of Revelation. He
described that pure and unsensual heaven destined to the virtuous--those
fires and torments that were the doom of guilt.

The doubts which spring up to the mind of later reasoners, in the
immensity of the sacrifice of God to man, were not such as would occur
to an early heathen. He had been accustomed to believe that the gods
had lived upon earth, and taken upon themselves the forms of men; had
shared in human passions, in human labours, and in human misfortunes.
What was the travail of his own Alcmena's son, whose altars now smoked
with the incense of countless cities, but a toil for the human race?
Had not the great Dorian Apollo expiated a mystic sin by descending to
the grave? Those who were the deities of heaven had been the lawgivers
or benefactors on earth, and gratitude had led to worship. It seemed
therefore, to the heathen, a doctrine neither new nor strange, that
Christ had been sent from heaven, that an immortal had indued mortality,
and tasted the bitterness of death. And the end for which He thus toiled
and thus suffered--how far more glorious did it seem to Apaecides than
that for which the deities of old had visited the nether world, and
passed through the gates of death! Was it not worthy of a God to,
descend to these dim valleys, in order to clear up the clouds gathered
over the dark mount beyond--to satisfy the doubts of sages--to convert
speculation into certainty--by example to point out the rules of
life--by revelation to solve the enigma of the grave--and to prove that
the soul did not yearn in vain when it dreamed of an immortality? In
this last was the great argument of those lowly men destined to convert
the earth. As nothing is more flattering to the pride and the hopes of
man