Gabriella made the only gesture of displeasure he had ever seen.

"Now," said David, straightening himself up, "I draw near to the
root of the matter. A sixth book takes up what we call the
civilization of this animal species, Man. It subdivides his
civilization into different civilizations. It analyzes these
civilizations, where it is possible, into their arts, governments,
literatures, religions, and other elements. And the seventh," he
resumed after a grave pause, scrutinizing her face most eagerly,
"the seventh takes up just one part of his civilizations--the
religions of the globe--and gives an account of these. It describes
how they have grown and flourished, how some have passed as
absolutely away as the civilizations that produced them. It teaches
that those religions were as natural a part of those civilizations
as their civil laws, their games, their wars, their philosophy;
that the religious books of these races, which they themselves
often thought inspired revelations, were no more inspired and no
more revelations than their secular books; that Buddha's faith or
Brahma's were no more direct from God than Buddhistic or Brahman
temples were from God; that the Koran is no more inspired than
Moorish architecture is inspired; that the ancient religion of the
Jewish race stands on the same footing as the other great religions
of the globe--as to being Supernatural; that the second religion of
the Hebrews, starting out of them, but rejected by them, the
Christian religion, the greatest of all to us, takes its place with
the others as a perfectly natural expression of the same human
desire and effort to find God and to worship Him through all the
best that we know in ourselves and of the universe outside us."