sect of our own Church, are perpetually in the wrong. Buy me, and
listen to me, and you will always be in the right.

PURCHASER: And, after this life, what have you to offer me?

POSITIVIST: A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible; but
not, of course, conscious immortality.

PURCHASER: Take him away, and put up another lot.

Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his
notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion
and Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a
sort of a something, might all be offered with their divers wares;
and cheaply enough, Lucian, you would value them in this auction of
Sects. "There is but one way to Corinth," as of old; but which that
way may be, oh master of Hermotimus, we know no more than he did of
old; and still we find, of all philosophies, that the Stoic route is
most to be recommended. But we have our Cyrenaics too, though they
are no longer "clothed in purple, and crowned with flowers, and fond
of drink and of female flute-players." Ah, here too, you might
laugh, and fail to see where the Pleasure lies, when the Cyrenaics
are no "judges of cakes" (nor of ale, for that matter), and are
strangers in the Courts of Princes. "To despise all things, to make
use of all things, in all things to follow pleasure only:" that is
not the manner of the new, if it were the secret of the older
Hedonism.

Then, turning from the philosophers to the seekers after a sign,
what change, Lucian, would you find in them and their ways? None;