There is a touch of Winter in my beard, A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence. And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, seemed to protest against the plea of age. The MS. was in the vilest “Shikastah” or running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the writer declined to take the trouble of copying out his cacograph. We, his old friends, had long addressed Hâjî Abdû by the sobriquet of _Nabbianâ_ (“our Prophet”); and the reader will see that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a message to deliver. He evidently aspires to preach a faith of his own; an Eastern Version of Humanitarianism blended with the sceptical or, as we now say, the scientific habit of mind. The religion, of which Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom; Judæism, Christianity and Islamism are mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted by the Philosopher: it worships with single-minded devotion the Holy Cause of Truth, of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods it may bring; and this belief is equally acceptable to honest ignorance, and to the highest attainments in nature-study. With Confucius, the Hâjî cultivates what Strauss has called the “stern common-sense of mankind”; while the reign of order is a paragraph of his “Higher Law.” He traces from its rudest beginnings the all but absolute universality of some perception by man, called “Faith”; that _sensus Numinis_ which, by inheritance or communication, is now universal except in those who force themselves to oppose it. And he evidently holds this general consent of mankind to be so far divine that it primarily discovered for itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He does not cry with the Christ of Novalis, “Children, you have no father”; and perhaps he would join Renan in exclaiming, _Un monde sans Dieu est horrible!_ But he recognises the incompatibility of the Infinite with the Definite; of a Being who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an _Actus purus_ who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful, with an “Eternal that makes for righteousness.” In the presence of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the _Begriff_ of Providence, our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed by the perception of a _Causa Causans_ (a misnomer), and to that intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of distinct statement but incapable of proofs, which we term Belief.