“In this sacred abode, as may easily be conceived, morality did not always go hand in hand with religion. The hypocritical and ambitious Orcus, who was, at this period, High Priest of Memphis, was a man, in every respect, qualified to preside over a system of such splendid fraud. He had reached that effective time of life, when enough of the warmth of youth remains to give animation to the counsels of age. But, in his instance, youth had only the baser passions to bequeath, while age but contributed a more refined maturity of mischief. The advantages of a faith appealing so wholly to the senses, were well understood by him; nor was he ignorant that the only way of making religion subservient to his own interests was by shaping it adroitly to the passions of others. “The state of misery and remorse in which the mind of Theora was kept by the scenes, however veiled by hypocrisy, which she witnessed around her, became at length intolerable. No perils that the cause of truth could bring with it would be half so dreadful as this endurance of sinfulness and deceit. Her child was, as yet, pure and innocent;—but, without that sentinel of the soul, Religion, how long might she continue so? “This thought at once decided her;—all other fears vanished before it. She resolved instantly to lay open to Alethe the whole secret of her soul; to make her, who was her only hope on earth, the sharer of all her hopes in heaven, and then fly with her, as soon as possible, from this unhallowed place, to the desert—to the mountains—to any place, however desolate, where God and the consciousness of innocence might be with them. “The promptitude with which her young pupil caught from her the divine truths, was even beyond what she expected. It was like the lighting of one torch at another,—so prepared was Alethe’s mind for the illumination. Amply was the mother now repaid for all her misery, by this perfect communion of love and faith, and by the delight with which she saw her beloved child—like the young antelope, when first led by her dam to the well,—drink thirstily by her side, at the source of all life and truth. “But such happiness was not long to last. The anxieties that Theora had suffered preyed upon her health. She felt her strength daily decline; and the thoughts of leaving, alone and unguarded in the world, that treasure which she had just devoted to heaven, gave her a feeling of despair which but hastened the ebb of life. Had she put in practice her resolution of flying from this place, her child might have been now beyond the reach of all she dreaded, and in the solitude of the wilderness would have found at least safety from wrong. But the very happiness she had felt in her new task diverted her from this project;—and it was now too late, for she was already dying.