thereof? Hast thou marked the fact that the missionary spirit, which was the glory of every other religion, so as to create continual wars undertaken for the sole purpose of forcing other peoples to adopt the religion of the conqueror, was constantly repressed by the Jewish laws and branded as a crime? And hast thou ever reflected upon the real signification of these facts?" "Yea," answered Arius, "and I have been taught that God, by Moses, so commanded the Jews in order to preserve the peculiar people from being seduced into following after strange gods, and adopting the idolatries which were everywhere believed in. For the idolatries thou hast named, and every false religion which had for its symbol a moon, a cow, a cock, or any symbol intended to indicate the fecundity of Nature, was only the worship of that very mystery of sex of which thou hast spoken such strange things, the deification of lasciviousness, the apotheosis of sensualism." "They finally became so, indeed," said Am-nem-hat, sadly, "when the original truth became thoroughly corrupted; but it was not so in the beginning. For if thou wilt keep in mind the fact that the original faith of every primitive nation held the true God to be a dualism that was to become a triad by the generation of a Son; if thou wilt remember that this Son was also held to be Hapi, ’the hidden,’ ’the concealed,’ ’the unrevealed,’ even as unto this day the high-priest of every temple in Egypt will declare unto thee; and, considering these things, thou wilt not surely say that the grand roll of Egyptian priests, stretching back for more than thirty centuries of recorded history from this age of ours, were all mere sensualists. On the contrary, thou wilt see in these singular rites and ceremonies, even in their present degraded form, the signs and symbols of a deathless longing in the hearts of that grand, pure, holy race of sacred priests, and of a search prosecuted over land and sea, through heaven, and earth, and hell, during all the fruitless and slow-gliding centuries, by every art, science, and resource known to men--a longing and a search after Hapi, ’the hidden one,’ ’the concealed Son,’ ’the unrevealed Saviour,’ for whom the whole creation groaneth--a sublime spectacle, sad and grand enough to move a god to pity! For while the crowd see only a splendid pageant in that annual festival in which, with torches and with magnificent display, the priests and the whole population at Memphis wander over the city, the river, and the lake, seeking in earth, and fire, and water, for the dismembered body of the dual god, thou wilt find among them aged, pure, sad, learned men, who see in the same grand spectacle the perpetual memorial of their world-old search for Hapi, ’the concealed’; and, if thou couldst gaze into their shut, silent, sorrowful hearts, thou wouldst see all the faculties of soul and spirit exhaling in a yearning prayer that he might