ss on his
features, a more quiet and self-possessed expression in his sunken eyes,
than she had marked for years. This apparent improvement was but
momentary--it was a false calm, which the least breeze could ruffle.

'May the gods bless thee, my brother!' said she, embracing him.

'The gods! Speak not thus vaguely; perchance there is but one God!'

'My brother!'

'What if the sublime faith of the Nazarene be true? What if God be a
monarch--One--Invisible--Alone? What if these numerous, countless
deities, whose altars fill the earth, be but evil demons, seeking to
wean us from the true creed? This may be the case, Ione!'

'Alas! can we believe it? or if we believed, would it not be a
melancholy faith answered the Neapolitan. 'What! all this beautiful
world made only human!--mountain disenchanted of its Oread--the waters
of their Nymph--that beautiful prodigality of faith, which makes
everything divine, consecrating the meanest flowers, bearing celestial
whispers in the faintest breeze--wouldst thou deny this, and make the
earth mere dust and clay? No, Apaecides: all that is brightest in our
hearts is that very credulity which peoples the universe with gods.'

Ione answered as a believer in the poesy of the old mythology would
answer. We may judge by that reply how obstinate and hard the contest
which Christianity had to endure among the heathens. The Graceful
Superstition was never silent; every, the most household, action of
their lives was entwined with it--it was a portion of life itself, as
the flowers are a part of the thyrsus. At every incident they recurred
to a god, every cup of wine was prefaced by a libation; the very
garlands on their thresholds were dedicated to some divinity; their
ancestors themselves, made holy, presided as Lares over their hearth and
hall. So abundant was belief with them, that in their own climes, at
this hour, idolatry has never thoroughly been outrooted: it changes but
its objects of worship; it appeals to innumerable saints where once it
resorted to divinities; and it pours its crowds, in listening reverence,
to oracles at the shrines of St. Januarius or St. Stephen, instead of to
those of Isis or Apollo.

But these superstitions were not to the early Christians the object of
contempt so much as of horror. They did not believe, with the quiet
scepticism of the heathen philosopher, that the gods were inventions of
the priests; nor even, with the vulgar, that, accordi