"So! so!" said the ancient, in tones of hopeless weariness. "Believe and live! Believe and live! ’He that believeth on me shall never die! He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live again.’ O new, strange faith, hidden through all the dynasties like the Nile’s undiscoverable source, yet ever hinted at in the few high, arid, half-intangible truths in which the priests of Ra believed! What if it be true? What if the spiritual dualism of the first cause, which the priests gradually elaborated into the splendid pageantry and elegant mysticism of Hesiri-Hes, and the offspring Horus, has at last become an actual truth by the incarnation of the spiritual Son of the one God that is necessarily a spiritual hermaphrodite? Through the long centuries the priests secretly sneered at the polytheisms which they taught to the people, and they did believe in one God that was utterly unknown to the masses of mankind, for whom they had neither name nor symbol; and they conceived him to be a dual entity, containing in himself the fullness of double spiritual sexhood; and they stood in awe of some grand revelation which they supposed would some time be made to mankind when this one, almighty, hermaphrodite spirit should ’beget’ with one side of his spiritual nature and ’conceive’ with the other, and incarnate its son in flesh, and save man by assuming human nature. This they saw foreshadowed in Hesiri-Hes; this was the mystery which the priests perceived in every Apis, the emblem of one ’hidden’ like the fountains of the Nile; for in the hieratic language Hapi, which is ’hidden,’ signifies both the sacred river and the sacred bull; for this they prepared the mummy that a body might be ready for the returning soul when ’the hidden’ should be revealed; this, the sacred scarabæi dimly intimated, and this was the secret mystery that lurked beneath the veil of Hes that ’no mortal hand hath lifted.’ Some such glorious revelation must have flitted past Greek Plato’s vision, when he longed for a clearer statement of the will of God to men, and prophesied the coming man. This was the grand thought of Moses, the monotheist, when in the same breath he denounced all forms of polytheism, and yet designated the one God whom he worshiped by a name which is the plural number of a Hebrew noun"; and, as if he had forgotten the presence of Arius altogether, who sat listening to this strange monologue with silent wonder, the ancient continued the unconscious utterance of his fervid meditations: "So hath it been throughout the world with every ancientest form of all original myths; for while Assyria and the Medo-Persians and other comparatively modern nations, and afterward the Greeks and Romans, borrowed only the lower, vulgar forms which the Egyptians had fashioned for popular use, in China Chang and Eng symbolized the original conception of one dual God that afterward degenerated into anthropomorphism; and in India Indra and Agni, a primitive conception