Joseph ceased speaking suddenly and stood waiting for his father to admire the miracle he had related, but Dan's tongue struggled with words; and Joseph, being taken as it were with another flux of words, and like one apprehensive of the argument that none shall undo God's handiwork, set out on the telling that the cause of man's lust of women was that God and the devil had a bet together--the devil saying that if God let him sting a man in a certain part of his hide he would get him in the end despite all that God might do to save him from hell. To which God, being in the humour, consented, and the sting was put into nearly all men. A few the devil overlooked, and these have much spared to them, and those out of whom the sting is taken in childhood are fortunate, but those who, like the wild man of the wood, cut the sting out of their own free will are worthy of all praise; and he cited the authority of Jesus that man should mutilate his body till it conform perforce to his piety. But the story of man's fall is told differently in the Book of Genesis, my son. The admonition that he was laying violent hands on a sacred book startled Joseph out of his meditations, and in some confusion of words and mind he began to prevaricate, saying that he thought he had made himself clear: the release of pious souls from the bondage of the flesh was more important than the continuance of the impious. Moreover in the days of Moses, Israel was not steeped in as many iniquities as she is now, and the Day of Judgment was not so close at hand. More men meant more sins, and sin has become so common that God can endure the torture no longer.... Again Joseph ceased speaking suddenly and, almost agape, stood gazing into his father's face, reading therein a great perplexity, for Dan was asking himself for what good reason had God given him so strange a son. He would have been content to let the story pass into another, but Joseph was waiting for him to speak, and speaking incontinently he said he had heard that in the Temple of Astoreth the Phoenician youths often castrated themselves with shards of shells or pottery and threw their testicles in the lap of the goddess crying out: art thou satisfied now, Astoreth? But he did not know of any text in their Scriptures that counselled such a practice; and the introduction of it seemed to savour of borrowing from the heathen. Whereupon Joseph averred that whereas the wont of the Phoenician youths is without reason, the same could not be said of Jesus' device to save a soul. To which Dan rejoined that the leaving of the knife for the man to mutilate himself with, seemed to him to be contrary to all the rumours of Jesus that had come to his ears. I have heard that he would set the law aside and the traditions of our race, declaring the uncircumcised to be acceptable to God as the Jew; that he sits down to food with the uncircumcised and lays no store on burnt offerings. Nor did Isaiah,