But then I am not a Christian; please understand that at once. I am a Jew, a Gentile, a Pharisee, and--a devil! I may be all four if I like and yet be Pope of Rome. Why not? since these are the days of free thought, and one's private religious opinions are not made the subject of inquisitorial examination. Moreover, all classes aid and abet the truly pious hypocrite, provided his hypocrisy be strictly consistent. With equal delightsomeness, all creeds, no matter how absurd, just now obtain some kind of a hearing. We are at perfect liberty to worship any sort of fetish we like, without interference. We can grovel before our Divine Self, and sink to the lowest possible level of degradation in ministering to its greedy wants, and yet we shall not for this cause be ostracised from society or excommunicated from any sacred pale. With clerics and with laymen alike, our Divine Self needs more care than our soul's salvation; for our Divine Self, in its splendid egoism, is a breathing, eating, drinking, digesting Necessity; our soul's salvation is a hazy, far-off, dubious concern wherein we are but vaguely interested, a sort of dream at night which we now and then remember languidly in the course of the day. Talking of dreams, one cannot but consider them with a certain respect. They are such very powerful "factors," as the useful penny-a-liner would say, in the world's history. We affect to despise them; and yet how large a portion of the community are at this moment getting their daily bread-and-butter out of nothing more substantial than the "airy fabric" of a vision, which in this particular instance has proved solid enough to establish itself as one of the foundations of European civilisation. "_The angel of the Lord appeared unto Joseph in a dream._"