“What is it now?” said Ethel, “when everyone is presuming to frighten and to dictate to everyone else? But I will ask a better question than that. I will ask if _you_ are kept up to duty by fear of punishment? If not, by what?” It was long before he spoke, and no one thought of breaking the silence, for it was a solemn one. “Whatever rectitude there is in me,” he said, “comes from an inherent repugnance to making chains for myself by forming habits that would fit me to dwell in Pluto’s region. Yes, it is a repugnance to the smoke, stench and torment of the Pluto-cratical domain, which was graphically and practically explained to me in earliest childhood, by my most vigorous mother. It is this deep-seated repugnance to moral smoke, stench and torment, which keeps me up to my idea of duty. And then, Miss Ethel, I certainly am not better than other men, but I surmise I was vastly better taught than some men are, from babyhood, and before birth. For, like thousands of men everywhere today, there comes to me a sort of homesick, perplexed feeling, at having to sojourn amid such ‘hell-let-loose’ conditions as (so-called) _society_ today represents. But we all seem to be chained, paralyzed, hypnotized,—heaven knows what, and unable to break up the influence, which has its grip on the church, and which the church wants to clamp on to the state.” “Paul Palmer,” said Ethel, with Quaker-like simplicity, “if thy mother had been at the Capitol, those who now conduct like Cerberi would have long since known themselves for what they are—not brutes, but interiorly pure spirits—perplexed and homesick at having ever to breathe the miasma of the Plutonic shores. “Look at this picture.” Ethel showed one of Flaxman’s engravings of Psyche in the lower regions: a fair spirit, standing in a dark defile, gazing upward in a maze of wonder, as with hope astrain. “Believe me, brothers, that is the spirit of the new age. A beautiful thing, intelligently expectant of soon being _itself_. We are all immortal men, and those whom Pluto seems to have chained, are not chained except by the fetters of one delusion—they deludedly think themselves beasts. But they are inherently of the so-called Dios Kouroi. And the Dios Kouroi know there is food in the upper air, and place and pleasures there convenient for the hundred-brained Cerberi who are but undeveloped gods. “Believe me,” she said slowly, a look of infinite joy glorifying her upraised countenance, “the Herculean power of the _Dios Kouroi_ can, when ordered, bring from the upper air a morsel to the Cerberi, and without weapons win them away to the heights.” Then to her it was as if down-reaching mighty arms, with clasped hands passed under her feet, lifted her with blissful enswathement to an electric oneness with delight-in-right.