“Science may prove the insignificance of this globe in the scale of creation,” said the stranger, “but it cannot prove the insignificance of man. What is the earth compared with the sun? A mole-hill by a mountain; yet the inhabitants of this earth can discover the elements of which the great orb exists, and will probably, ere long, ascertain all the conditions of its being. Nay, the human mind can penetrate far beyond the sun. There is no relation, therefore, between the faculties of man and the scale in creation of the planet which he inhabits.... But there are people now who tell you there never was any creation, and therefore there never could have been a creator.”--“And which is now advanced with the confidence of novelty,” said the Syrian, “though all of it has been urged, and vainly urged, thousands of years ago. There must be design, or all we see would be without sense, and I do not believe in the unmeaning. As for the natural forces to which all creation is now attributed, we know that they are unconscious, while consciousness is as inevitable a portion of our existence as the eye or the hand. The conscious cannot be derived from the unconscious. Man is divine.... Is it more unphilosophical to believe in a personal God omnipotent and omniscient, than in natural forces unconscious and irresistible? Is it unphilosophical to combine power with intelligence? Goethe, a Spinozist who did not believe in Spinoza, said he could bring his mind to the conception that in the centre of space we might meet with a monad of pure intelligence. Is that more philosophical than the truth first revealed to man amid these everlasting hills,” said the Syrian, “that God made man in His own image?” ... “It is the charter of the nobility of man ... one of the divine dogmas revealed in this land; not the invention of councils, not one of which was held on this sacred soil; confused assemblies first got together by the Greeks, and then by barbarous nations in barbarous times.”--“Yet the divine land no longer tells us divine things,” said “Lothair.” “It may, or may not, have fulfilled its destiny,” said the Syrian. “‘In my Father’s house are many mansions,’ and by the various families of nations the designs of the Creator are accomplished. God works by races,[95] and one was appointed in due season, and after many developments, to reveal and expound in this land the spiritual nature of man....”