"I perceive your irony," said the Cardinal, "and I recognize your wit. What astonishes me is the interest you take in these old myths and dreary services. The charm of novelty must have worn itself out by this time." "Christ is real to many men," said Inglesant, "and the world seems to manifest within itself a remedial power such as may be supposed to be His." "I do not dispute such a power," replied the Cardinal; "I only wonder at the attachment to these old myths which profess to expound it." "The world has now been satisfied with them for some centuries," said Inglesant; "and for my own part, even in the blaze of a purer Mythos, I cannot help thinking that some of us will look back with longing to ’one of the days of the Son of man.’ I do not perceive either that your Eminence attempts to improve matters." "I can afford to wait," replied the Cardinal, with lofty indifference; "the myths of the world are slow to change." "This one certainly," replied Inglesant, with a smile, "has been slow to change, perhaps because men found in it something that reminded them of their daily life. It speaks of suffering and of sin. The cross of Christ is composed of many other crosses—is the centre, the type, the essence of all crosses. We must _suffer_ with Christ whether we _believe_ in Him or not. We must suffer for the sin of others as for our own; and in this suffering we find a healing and purifying power and element. That is what gives to Christianity, in its simplest and most unlettered form, its force and life. Sin and suffering for sin: a sacrifice, itself mysterious, offered mysteriously to the Divine Nemesis or Law of Sin,—dread, undefined, unknown, yet sure and irresistible, with the iron necessity of law. This the intellectual Christ, the Platonic-Socrates, did not offer: hence his failure, and the success of the Nazarene. Vicisti Galilæe." *CHAPTER IV.*