the world than its progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of Shakespeare. In that land you,--who, according to your own showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and inspiration to still higher endeavor--you have been, poisoned by the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise and 'highly cultured' to believe in anything. It is a most unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes of national disease and downfall; it is difficult to breathe it without becoming fever-smitten; and in your denial of the divinity of Christ, I do not blame you any more than I would blame a poor creature struck down by a plague. You have caught the negative, agnostic, and atheistical infection from others,--it is not the natural, healthy condition of your temperament." "On the contrary it IS, so far as that point goes," said Alwyn with sudden heat--"I tell you I am amazed,--utterly amazed, that you, with your intelligence, should uphold such a barbaric idea as the Divinity of Christ! Human reason revolts at it,--and after all, make as light of it as you will, reason is the only thing that exalts us a little above the level of the beasts." "Nay--the beasts share the gift of reason in common with us," replied Heliobas, "and Man only proves his ignorance if he denies the fact. Often indeed the very insects show superior reasoning ability to ourselves, any thoroughly capable naturalist would bear me out in this assertion." "Well, well!" and Alwyn grew impatient--"reason or no reason, I again repeat that the legend on which Christianity is founded is absurd and preposterous,--why, if there were a grain of truth in it, Judas Iscariot instead of being universally condemned, ought to be honored and canonized as the first of saints!"