name thou
allottest to them?'

'God is just, and abandons not His creatures for their mere human
frailty. God is merciful, and curses none but the wicked who repent
not.'

'Yet it seemeth to me as if, in the divine anger, I had been smitten by
a sudden madness, a supernatural and solemn frenzy, wrought not by human
means.'

'There are demons on earth,' answered the Nazarene, fearfully, 'as well
as there are God and His Son in heaven; and since thou acknowledgest not
the last, the first may have had power over thee.'

Glaucus did not reply, and there was a silence for some minutes. At
length the Athenian said, in a changed, and soft, and half-hesitating
voice. 'Christian, believest thou, among the doctrines of thy creed,
that the dead live again--that they who have loved here are united
hereafter--that beyond the grave our good name shines pure from the
mortal mists that unjustly dim it in the gross-eyed world--and that the
streams which are divided by the desert and the rock meet in the solemn
Hades, and flow once more into one?'

'Believe I that, O Athenian No, I do not believe--I know! and it is that
beautiful and blessed assurance which supports me now. O Cyllene!'
continued Olinthus, passionately, 'bride of my heart! torn from me in
the first month of our nuptials,' shall I not see thee yet, and ere many
days be past? Welcome, welcome death, that will bring me to heaven and
thee!'

There was something in this sudden burst of human affection which struck
a kindred chord in the soul of the Greek. He felt, for the first time,
a sympathy greater than mere affliction between him and his companion.
He crept nearer towards Olinthus; for the Italians, fierce in some
points, were not unnecessarily cruel in others; they spared the separate
cell and the superfluous chain, and allowed the victims of the arena the
sad comfort of such freedom and such companionship as the prison would
afford.

'Yes,' continued the Christian, with holy fervor, 'the immortality of
the soul--the resurrection--the reunion of the dead--is the great
principle of our creed--the great truth a God suffered death itself to
attest and proclaim. No fabled Elysium--no poetic Orcus--but a pure and
radiant heritage of heaven itself, is the portion of the good.'

'Tell me, then, thy doctrines, and expound to me thy hopes,' said
Glaucus, earnestly.

Olinthus was not slow to obey that prayer; and there--as oftentimes in
the early ages of the Chris