“Ah, Lazarus! How can you linger away off in those beautiful and wicked cities of Greece, buried in spiritual darkness, and studying their foolish or insane philosophies, when the Source of all light has risen, and the Fountain of all truth has been opened in your own country! Oh hasten to your home in our hearts and see these great things for yourself. If you cannot share my faith, you will at least receive and reciprocate my love. “Ever your MARY.” If these strange things had occurred soon after my father’s death, when the spirit of religious inquiry was strong, and when I loved to search the Scriptures with my sisters, I would have been deeply, intensely interested in them. But the hardest thing in the world is to make a devotee out of a man who thinks himself a philosopher. My uncle had not converted me to the doctrines of Zoroaster, but he had convinced me that Zoroaster, Moses, and all the great leaders of religious thought derived their inspiration from the same source. I came tacitly to believe that no special Messiah was coming to the Jews, any more than to the Persians or Egyptians or Romans, all of whom needed deliverance from mountains of sin and wildernesses of error, quite as much as the Hebrew nation which constituted so small a fraction of the human race. Moreover the influence of travel, and especially my free and happy life at Athens, had quite denationalized me. I was no longer a Jew. I had breathed the mystic and magical air of Egypt, and had peeped into one of the very cradles of the human race; where I found everything so strange and so unlike what I had been taught by our childish Hebrew traditions. I had trodden all the glorious and beautiful grounds hallowed in the immortal history and songs of Greece. I no longer wondered at the host of gods and goddesses which were conjured from the misty deeps of antiquity, to guard a nature so prolific and fair, and a people so perfect in form and so gifted in spirit. The traditions of Greece, the poetry, the eloquence, the music, the philosophy, the art, and the divine architecture, which seemed a combination of them all, had so impressed and transformed my mind, that I looked back to my narrow circle of life and thought in Judea, as a man looks back upon the school-room and play-ground of his childhood. After these things, it was impossible for me to believe that the Jews were the favored people of God, and that the descendants of the patriarchs were to govern the world. It was as easy to believe that the sun rose in Jericho and set in Joppa. Therefore I smiled at my sister’s pious enthusiasm, and said to myself: