"No dream of ours," said Saul, "Jehovah is. Nay, nay, alas, far otherwise than so, Our Hebrew dreams of God have, like the dreams Dreamed by all races of mankind besides, Grovelled to low and lower, have bestial been, Or reptile, nay, to insensate wood and stone Descended; we have loved idolatry, We, with the rest, and hardly healed have been, Though purged with hyssop of dire history, Constrained--against the subtly treacherous soft Relentings of our heart, oft yielded to, Then punished oft full sore, which bade us spare Whom God to spare forbade--constrained to slay With our own swords, abolish utterly, The idolatrous possessors of this land, In judgment just on their idolatry, And lest we too be tainted with their sin; Yet foul relapse despite, and after, stripes, Stripes upon stripes again and yet again, Suffered from the right hand of God incensed, Defeat, captivity, long servitude, With the probe searched, with the knife carved until Scarce left was life to bear the cautery Wherewith a holy and a jealous God Out of our quivering soul throughly would burn That clinging, deep, inveterate human plague Inherited from Adam in his fall, That devil-taught depravity which prompts Apostasy to other gods no gods-- Hardly so healed, with dreadful chastisement, Has been my nation of her dreadful crime. Loth, slow, ingrate, rebellious pupils, we Taught have been thus to worship only God-- Jehovah, only God of the whole earth!" Those last words as he spoke, Saul his right hand Swept round in waving gesture--for they now A height of goodly prospect had attained, Wherefrom, pausing to breathe their laboring steeds, They backward looked beneath them far abroad-- Swept round his hand, as if the circuit wide Of the whole earth might there his words attest; Their fill they gazed, then upward strained once more. At length a stage of smoother going reached, Sergius, abreast of Saul, took up the word: "Yea, might one deem thy Hebrew race indeed Had been the subjects of such history, So purposed, then sound were thine argument And thy Jehovah would be very God, And God alone, and God of the whole earth. But other races too besides thine own Have had their chances, their vicissitudes; Fortune to all has served her whirling wheel, And every several race has had its turn Of rising now, now sinking in the dust. Wherefore should we you Hebrews sole of all Reckon divinely taught by history, Taught to be theists in an atheist world, Or in a world idolatrous, of God The True, the Only, only worshippers?"