He would tell Messer Montano, with his sweet, frank eyes arraigning that crabbed philosopher’s soul, how this unstained first-born of Nature, this sinless heir of love, this wise and pitying Christ, moved by an infinite compassion to see the wounded souls of his brothers—those few who had not made their backward flight too difficult—come, soiled and earth-cloyed, to seek their reincarnation in the spring, had descended, himself, upon earth at last, sacrificing his birthright of divinity, that he might teach men how to live. And the men his brothers had slain him, in jealousy, even as Cain slew Abel; yet had his spirit, imperishably great, continued to dwell in their midst, knowing that, did it once leave the earth, it must be for ever, and to mankind’s eternal unregeneracy. For, so Bernardo insisted, there was an immutable law in Nature that no soul reincarnated could re-enter the sphere from which it was last returned, but must seek new fields of action. Wherefore all earth-loving spirits, which we call apparitions, were such as after death clung about the ways of men, in a yearning hopefulness to redeem them by touching their hearts with sympathy and their eyes with a mist of sorrow. And, of such gentle ghosts, Christ was but the first in faith and tenderness. A wild, dim theory, peopling woods, and fields, and cities with a mystic company—phantoms, yet capable of revealing themselves in fitful glimpses to the sinless and the sympathetic among men—ghosts, weaving impalpable webs of love across populous ways to catch men’s souls in their meshes. Montano called it all transcendental fustian. It aroused his most virulent scorn. What had this cloud-moulding, moon-paring stuff to do with the practical issues of life, with freedom, and government by popular representation? He even professed to prefer to it Lascaris, with his metaphysical jargon and apostolic succession of atoms. ’He gives you at least something to take hold of,’ he snarled. ’Listen to this’—and he condescended to read an excerpt from a recent treatise by his hated rival:— ’"Life,"’ he read, ’"is put out at compound interest. We represent, each in himself, a fraction of the principal, having a direct pedigree _ab initio_. As a spider will gather the hundred strands of his web into a little ball which he will swallow, so might we each absorb and claim the whole vast web of life. Rolled up to include each radiating thread, the web becomes I; the spider is I; I am the principal of life—not the principle: that is Prometheus’ secret."’