"What has the poor little planet done?" he repeated slowly--"The poor little planet has done--nothing. But it is what the gods have done with this same poor little planet, that awakens my anger and scorn. They have made it a living sphere of wonders,--endowed it with beauty borrowed from the fairest corners of highest Heaven,--decked it with flowers and foliage,--taught it music,--the music of birds and torrents and rolling waves and falling rains,--rocked it gently in clear ether, among such light as blinds the eyes of mortals,--guided it out of chaos, through clouds of thunder and barbëd shafts of lightning, to circle peacefully in its appointed orbit, lit on the one hand by the vivid splendours of the sun, and on the other by the sleepy radiance of the moon;--and more than all this, they have invested it with a Divine Soul in man! Oh, you may disbelieve as you will,--but notwithstanding the pigmy peeps earth takes at the vast and eternal ocean of Science, the Soul is here, and all the immortal forces with it and around it! Nay, the gods--I speak in the plural, after the fashion of the ancient Greeks--for to my thinking there are many gods emanating from the Supreme Deity,--the gods, I say, have so insisted on this fact, that One of them has walked the earth in human guise, solely for the sake of emphasizing the truth of Immortality to these frail creatures of seemingly perishable clay! For this I hate the planet;--were there not, and are there not, other and far grander worlds that a God should have chosen to dwell on than this one!" For a moment I was silent, out of sheer surprise. "You amaze me!" I said at last--"You allude to Christ, I suppose; but everybody is convinced by this time that He was a mere man like the rest of us; there was nothing divine about Him. What a contradiction you are! Why, I remember you indignantly denied the accusation of being a Christian." "Of course,--and I deny it still"--he answered quickly--"I have not a fat living in the church that I should tell a lie on such a subject. I am not a Christian; nor is anyone living a Christian. To quote a very old saying 'There never was a Christian save One, and He was crucified.' But though I am not a Christian I never said I doubted the existence of Christ. That knowledge was forced upon me,--with considerable pressure too!" "By a reliable authority?" I inquired with a slight sneer. He made no immediate reply. His flashing eyes looked, as it were, through me and beyond me at something far away. The curious pallor that at times gave his face the set look of an impenetrable mask, came upon him then, and he smiled,--an awful smile. So might a man smile out of deadly bravado, when told of some dim and dreadful torture awaiting him.