that around us? Are all our purposes and energies but as the gropings of the blind, without aim or object? Will the time come when children will jeer at us as erring fools and insane dreamers, scared by what did not exist, and amused by empty juggling? Can this be? Can even that which is most high and sacred, which we have believed in and lived for with our fathers--for which thousands of inspired martyrs have died with a halo of glory around their beaming countenances--for which our pilgrims and Crusaders wend to Jerusalem, and renounce all the riches and treasures of this world--which was the spring of action in our ancestors' lives as our own, and made them heroes and conquerors in life and death--could all that be dreaming, deception, and ignorance? Could the existence and achievements of whole centuries have been a monstrous lie? No! No! If yonder fellow be not a liar and a cheat, there is neither truth, nor life, nor redemption, nor salvation." He shrunk with horror from his own thoughts. A sound now reached his ears which, at this moment, almost struck him with dismay. He fancied he once more heard the voice of the mysterious stranger close beside him. "Darest thou not yet face the naked truth? my dear Laurentius!" sounded the shrill voice of the philosopher, slowly and solemnly through the thin wooden partition of the adjoining chamber. "Dost thou dread to enter into the holy calling of a Leccar Brother, and priest of nature? Dost thou tremble at an initiation into the great church of the world, of which we are all originally priests; we who have eyes for truth, and courage to announce it, despite the repeated outcry of the fools of thirteen centuries! Look, I open unto thee the great sanctuary in the name of truth and science, and in the sight of that deity who dwells in the breast of the initiated. Cast off the miserable prejudices of thy time! Throw down the phantom thou callest the Church, and a saving faith, with the same strength with which thou hast rejected the senseless fables of heathenism! Cast off all that was not given thee when thou becamest a human being! Rid thyself of all exploded and worn out doctrines--cast off the whole puerile tissue of phantasms and visions of crude ages, which thou callest Revelation! Divest thyself of thy preconceptions regarding the essence of things, and of all the pomp and imagery thou callest poetry! Then gaze freely around thee, and tell me what remains!" "Nothing! nothing! learned master!" answered the voice of the young Icelander, in a desponding tone. "Yes, assuredly!" was the answer; "thou thyself remainest, and great eternal nature, and, if thou wilt, a great and mighty deity, which is the soul and life of this nature of which thou art thyself a part--all truth, all wisdom lie slumbering and buried there. Wake it if thou canst! Call forth deity in thyself and in nature! Rule it by that mighty art! Ask boldly, and force it to respond!"