“Now,” said I, “I shall get light.” I put down the letter and took up the three gospels—the packet from Flaccus. But a glance shewed that it would be a long and difficult business to find the passage in them, and to compare their three versions with the one in Paul’s epistle. So I turned to the postscript again, “Next look in the three gospels and prepare to be surprised. You will find the following four facts. First, none of them contain the words ‘Do this to my remembering.’ Secondly, the latest gospel (that of Lucas) makes no mention of a ‘covenant.’ Thirdly, the two earliest gospels do not call the covenant ‘new.’ Fourthly, the Greek word may mean not ‘covenant’ at all, but ‘testament’; and the meaning may be that their leader bequeaths them his blood—whatever that may mean—by his last will and testament. “Now I put it to you, Silanus, as a reasonable man, whether it is worth while investigating a superstition as to which the earliest documents disagree concerning such a fundamental fact (or rather allegation). These Christians—for I am informed they mostly take Paul’s view—assert that their Founder made a ‘_new covenant_’ between them and God on a special night. Three of them give accounts—detailed accounts—of all manner of things that happened on that night. A fourth, Paul, professes to give the very words of the Founder of the Covenant, as he received them from the Founder himself, not alive of course but dead! And he, Paul, _alone of the four, mentions the phrase_ ‘_new covenant_.’ What do you think of this?” Indeed I did not know what to think of it. And Scaurus’s next words almost decided me to take his view of the whole matter, to put away all my Jewish and Christian books and to have done with every kind of philosophy. “Spare me,” so the postscript proceeded, “for the sake of the immortal Gods, my dearest Quintus, spare me the pain—during the few years or months of life that may still remain for me—of seeing the son of my dearest friend ensnared in the net of a beguiling superstition that must lead you away from your duty to your country. Be kind to me and to your father.” Not having read the preceding part of his letter, I was amazed at this outburst of alarm in my behalf. But I perceived that, with his usual sympathetic insight, he had read some of my thoughts almost before I was conscious of them myself, and I was grateful to him. If he had stopped there, I sometimes think things might have happened differently. But he continued, “_Truth_, as Sophocles says, _is always right_. Be true to the truth. Be true to yourself. Amid all the shifting fancies and falsehoods around you, esteem the knowledge of yourself the only knowledge that is certain and unchangeable. In that respect the old philosophers were right. ‘Know thyself’ is the only divine precept. On self-knowledge alone is based the only covenant—if indeed it is fit to imagine any covenant—between God and man.”