"I understand, I excuse it--and yet I ask that it may cease," replied Edwin, "for really the danger with which the children of the world threaten the children of God, is a purely imaginary one. The offence we give is very harmless. No mind which, in your sense of the word, is religiously disposed, will endure to think of the world without a personal Creator. No seduction can take place where the germ of the fall did not previously exist. And the vacillating or utterly frivolous cannot be of so much importance to you as peace and tolerance. I cannot forsee the future, but I have a conviction that the time will never come, when all men will declare that they are of age and have outgrown the childhood that renders them happy, any more than that political freedom will ever become a necessity to all. Only let people cease to measure differences in viewing the world by moral standards, to regulate for the individual his capacities and wants, God and the world, to call him to account for mere opinions which have a very slight influence upon his actions. To be sure, those ideas of God, freedom, immortality, which even the free thinkers of the last century recognized as an inalienable possession of mankind, have at last, in popular opinion, been called in question by our intrusive, persistent investigation. But I'm as sure as of my own existence, that a time will come when honest children of the world will be permitted, without suspicion, to renounce that trinity also, and is not the hope of contributing to such a future worth the toil of the noblest? Then for the first time the word tolerance will have attained its full sense; then conversations like ours will be conducted without the slightest tinge of vehemence or bitterness, which have blended here and there with our words to-day, and for which I in particular, as a philosopher, who ought to have learned to be patient and trust to time, sincerely beg my honored friend's pardon." He bent toward her, took her hand, and raised it to his lips. She absently permitted him to do so, absorbed in thoughts which she apparently could not express in words. He had already reached the door, when she said sudden: "Does Leah know these opinions of yours?" He paused. A dull pain, a feeling of regret, overpowered him, which he did not know how to explain. "We have never discussed these questions," he replied, "or as school children say, we've not yet _come_ to them. We're still at the Greek philosophers." "But when you progress so far, shall you tell her openly what you think?"