"'You say nothing? _Qui tacet consentire videtur_,--silence means consent. I can see in your face how overawed you are by my sagacity, I have unmasked you. We unmask everything and anything. We unmask stones, pyramids, crocodiles, ichneumons, princes, kings, prophets, and heroes. We strike terror into the common people by our vast erudition and our penetrating sagacity. "'We are the Sherlock Holmes of theology. "'We run down any pretender, any scribe, any man who has the impudence of posing as a somebody. Given that we are not much; how can he be anything? "'If you will stay here for some time, you will soon know a lot about what did not happen in ancient Israel. "'Oxford is the Scotland Yard of all those humbugs that pass by the name of Abraham, Moses, King David, Samson, the Prophets, and other impostors. We have pin-pricked them out of existence! "'At present we have proved that all the Religion of Israel was stolen from Babylon. In a few years we shall prove that the Babylonians stole it all from the Elamites, farther east. This, once well established, will give us a welcome means of proving that the Elamites stole it all from the Thibetans; who stole it from the Chinese; who stole it from the Japanese; who stole it from the Redskins in America; who stole it from the Yankees; who stole it from Oxford. And so we shall return to this great University and provide occupation and fame for the higher critics of the next three hundred years. Where are you now, O Pseudo-Socrates?' "I was unable to say a word for some time. When I collected myself to a certain extent, I said: "'O Sophist, if our Religion in ancient Greece had had no other advantage than that of saving us from the works of "higher critics," it has deserved well of us. We were immune from that disease, at any rate. Dion of Prusa and others wrote declamations against the historicity of the Trojan War; but nobody took them for more than what they were, for rhetorical exercises. No Hellene would have paid the slightest attention, nor accorded the slightest recognition to men like yourself. The English must be suffering from very ugly religious crochets and spiritual eczemas, to have recourse to drugs and pills offered by such medicine-men.' * * * * * "Other friends in England to whom I expressed my profound aversion to this puny scepticism in matters of Religion, advised me to attend the sermons given by a relatively young man with white hair in a temple in the city. They said that in him and his addresses there was religious sentiment. I accepted their advice and went repeatedly to hear what was called _The New Religion_. "The young man talked well and impressively. He told them that two and two made four, and absolutely refused to make five.