ert!
Our religion? you behold it! Yon cross our sole image, yon scroll the
mysteries of our Caere and Eleusis! Our morality? it is in our
lives!--sinners we all have been; who now can accuse us of a crime? we
have baptized ourselves from the past. Think not that this is of us, it
is of God. Approach, Medon,' beckoning to the old slave who had spoken
third for the admission of Apaecides, 'thou art the sole man amongst us
who is not free. But in heaven, the last shall be first: so with us.
Unfold your scroll, read and explain.'

Useless would it be for us to accompany the lecture of Medon, or the
comments of the congregation. Familiar now are those doctrines, then
strange and new. Eighteen centuries have left us little to expound upon
the lore of Scripture or the life of Christ. To us, too, there would
seem little congenial in the doubts that occurred to a heathen priest,
and little learned in the answers they receive from men uneducated,
rude, and simple, possessing only the knowledge that they were greater
than they seemed.

There was one thing that greatly touched the Neapolitan: when the
lecture was concluded, they heard a very gentle knock at the door; the
password was given, and replied to; the door opened, and two young
children, the eldest of whom might have told its seventh year, entered
timidly; they were the children of the master of the house, that dark
and hardy Syrian, whose youth had been spent in pillage and bloodshed.
The eldest of the congregation (it was that old slave) opened to them
his arms; they fled to the shelter--they crept to his breast--and his
hard features smiled as he caressed them. And then these bold and
fervent men, nursed in vicissitude, beaten by the rough winds of
life--men of mailed and impervious fortitude, ready to affront a world,
prepared for torment and armed for death--men, who presented all
imaginable contrast to the weak nerves, the light hearts, the tender
fragility of childhood, crowded round the infants, smoothing their
rugged brows and composing their bearded lips to kindly and fostering
smiles: and then the old man opened the scroll and he taught the infants
to repeat after him that beautiful prayer which we still dedicate to the
Lord, and still teach to our children; and then he told them, in simple
phrase, of God's love to the young, and how not a sparrow falls but His
eye sees it. This lovely custom of infant initiation was long cherished
by the early Churc