=Human Fate.=--The teacher said: "The destinies of men are obscure; therefore one should be extremely careful in judging. The Tower of Siloam was ready to fall, and fell on good and evil alike. The disciples asked Christ what sin the man born blind had committed. Christ answered that neither he nor his parents had committed any special sin. When we see how some are born crippled, blind, deaf, and dumb, we had best be silent. To lament their lot may annoy them, for they seem to be protected in a mysterious way. They are objects of pity, and seldom fall into abject poverty. They are good-humoured through life, and hardly seem to suffer under their ailments. But woe to the man who ridicules anyone marked out by such a fate! If he is persistently pursued by calamity, or struck himself by a greater misfortune, one can hardly ignore it by using the formula 'chance.' A person who had scoffed at a blind man was struck in the eye by a stone which was thrown into a tramcar. At first he was alarmed, and thought of Nemesis. But when he heard that the stone had been so hurled as the result of some blasting operations he became cheerful, _i.e._ more ignorant, and said it was a chance. He saw the phenomenon, but nothing behind it; the effect, but not the cause. "The 'Beans' cannot see beyond their noses. Sometimes, when they have long noses, they see somewhat further. The supernatural in nature is incomprehensible to their intelligence. Indeed, all which passes their limited understanding is for them supernatural. That is logical, but these rustics regard it as illogical." =Dark Rays.=--As the teacher wandered through his Inferno, he came to a temple of black granite, which was quite dark inside. Within it something was going on, but he could not distinguish what. "What is it?" he asked a white-robed figure, which wore a laurel-wreath, but had a green face spotted blue like a corpse. "That is a temple of light," it answered; "but the initiated cannot see our black rays until he receives the white arsenic-kiss from the ultra-violet priestess." "Give me the kiss," answered the teacher, but he turned his back to her at the same time. However, she did not notice this, as she could not distinguish back from front. Now his eyes were opened, and he saw how within the temple they were offering incense to their "gods of light," as they called them. There stood the murderer Barabbas, a halo round his head, and a plate on his breast with the inscription: "Acquitted because of insufficient evidence." There sat Judas Iscariot under his fig-tree, with the thirty pieces of silver, in the bosom of his family, promoted to be general-director of customs. There were the Emperor Nero, fresh from the bath, with a white dove on his hand, and Julian the Apostate near an altar, with geese sacrificed upon it.