'I am almost unwilling to converse on this topic with you, Marcus,' I rejoined, 'for there is nothing in your nature, or rather in your educated nature, to which to appeal with the least hope of any profitable result, either to me, or you. The gods have, as you say, given you a good heart--I may add too, a most noble head; but, yourself and education together, have made you so thoroughly a man of the world, that the interests of any other part of your nature, save those of the intellect and the senses, are to you precisely as if they did not exist.' 'Right, Lucius; therein do I claim honor and distinction. The intangible, the invisible, the vague, the shadowy, I leave to women and priests--concerning myself only with the substantial realities of life. Great Jupiter! what would become of mankind were we all women, and priests? How could the courts go on--senates sit, and deliberate--armies conquer? I think the world would stand still. However, I object not to a popular faith, such as that which now obtains throughout, the Roman world. If mankind, as history seems to prove, must and will have something of the kind, this perhaps is as good as anything else; and, seeing it has once become established and fixed in the way it has, I think it ought no more to be disturbed than men's faith in their political institutions. Our concern should be, merely to regulate it, that it grow not too large, and so overlay and crush the state. Fanatics and bigots must be hewn away. There must be an occasional infusion of doubt and indifference into the mass, to keep it from fermenting. You cannot be offended, Lucius, at the way in which I speak of your new-adopted faith. I think no better of any other. Epicureans, Stoics, Platonists, Jews, Christians, they are all alike to me. I hold them all at arms length. I have listened to them all; and more idle, indigested fancies never did I hear--no, not from the new-fledged advocate playing the rhetorician at his first appearance.' 'I do not wonder, Curtius, that you have turned away dissatisfied with the philosophers. I do not wonder that you reject the popular superstitions. But I do wonder, that you will prejudge any question, or infer the intrinsic incredibility of whatever may take the form of religion, from the intrinsic incredibility of what the world has heretofore possessed. It surely is not a philosophical method.'