"--To-day, with the manufacture of aeroplanes ranking as a standardized business, and with radios in every third home, these miracles, as you see for yourself, do not sound a bit remarkable. To-day, with one precaution, nobody need question that Pietro d'Apone actually did hold imprisoned, each in his separate metal vase, seven spirits to instruct him audibly in astronomy, alchemy and philosophy, in painting, physic, poetry and music. The needful precaution is, of course, merely to call these vases phonographs." "I see, I see," said Harrowby, quietly. He was still smiling, for some reason or another. "They were crystal vases, by the way. And they were not phonographs." "Anyhow," I answered, in the dismissory large manner of Mrs. Nickleby, "the principle is the same. And beyond just such material suggestions I, for one, would not venture--" "I think," Harrowby stated, "that you will very soon hear others going farther. Men begin to perceive, in a great many other ways, that for some two thousand years has existed covertly a vast fund of knowledge and philosophy and religious teaching, not necessarily at odds with the more popular tenets of Christendom, but not sharing anything with these tenets nor at all reverencing them." To me this sounded interestingly insane. So I began, "But, why--?" "It is, obviously, a fund which its inheritors have been compelled to keep occult, through Christendom's set habit of arraigning and murdering out of hand all caught adherents to such irritating standards, as sorcerers." "Indeed?" said I, with a pleasant consciousness of now having him nicely started. "Men are beginning," Harrowby continued, "to discover piecemeal by 'scientific' methods something of that knowledge which sorcerers, as ignoramuses call them, have since time's youth attained through rather different avenues. And more and more widely is the fact becoming recognized that sorcery and witchcraft and magic were as far from being popular delusions as they were remote from being implicated with Christian mythology, to the imputed extent of siding with the devil against Heaven." "You don't tell me!" I observed. But he did. He went on to tell me, in fact, a great deal more. For here, he told me, is a religion really old: and to its adherents that faith which came out of Nazareth seems still, they say, an upstart affair which may yet prove ephemeral. So the devotees of that elder faith have not ever really concerned themselves with Christianity, not even those of them who have, for one reason or another, become bishops and cardinals and popes. There had been, in the outcome of this indifference, Dick Harrowby considered, something of irony: and it was droll enough to reflect that the supreme head of the Christian church--as when Gerbert of Aurillac, Hildebrand, Felice Peretti, Benedict Cajetan or Jacques d'Euse was pope,--had so often been the devout practitioner of an unspeakably more ancient religion.