"O glorious certitude of youth and hope!" said the ancient, mournfully. "O bold, triumphant faith, fitting its possessor for happy and jubilant exertion in the accomplishment of all life’s aims and purposes! Thou wast ’never such an idiot as to doubt it!’ But I, that have seen nigh fourscore years of misery, do doubt it much and painfully. I that have mastered all the arts, science, and religion of ancient Egypt--a land that was wrinkled with age centuries before the era of old Moses; I that know both all that the priests of Kem ever taught the people, and also the higher and more recondite forms of ignorance in which the priests themselves believed--I verily know nothing! I can scarcely believe in anything save universal spiritual darkness, for which no day-spring cometh, and universal wretchedness, for which there is no cure. O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" The bloodless hands were clasped upon the ancient’s aching breast, the noble gray head was bowed with hopeless sorrow, the weary eyes seemed dim with long and bitter anguish. Arius gazed upon him with astonishment and sympathy. Then the grand gifts of every born minister of Christ, the missionary’s yearning to instruct, the physician’s longing for the power to heal and to strengthen, moved in the boy’s heart, and once more he sprang to his feet, and with extended hand that quivered with emotion like the python’s tongue, and tearful, scintillant eyes, and head bent forward from the long, lithe neck, and a strange thrill in his vibrant musical voice, he cried: "Who shall deliver thee? Surely Jesus Christ, our Lord! He saveth even unto the uttermost all that come unto God by him. Believe and live!"