with a slight smile. "I have heard all this so often before, from
divers kinds of men both educated and ignorant, who have a willful
habit of forgetting all that Christ Himself prophesied concerning
His creed of Self-renunciation, so difficult to selfish humanity:
'Think not that I come to send peace on the earth. I come, not to
send peace, but a sword.' Again 'Ye shall be hated of all men for
my name's sake.' ... 'all ye shall be offended because of me.'
Such plain words as these seem utterly thrown away upon this
present generation. And do you know I find a curious lack of
originality among so-called 'freethinkers'; in fact their thoughts
can hardly be designated as 'free' when they all run in such
extremely narrow grooves of similitude--a flock of sheep mildly
trotting under the guidance of the butcher to the slaughterhouse
could not be more tamely alike in their bleating ignorance as to
where they are going. Your opinions, for instance, differ scarce a
whit from those of the common boor who, reading his penny Radical
paper, thinks he can dispense with God, and talks of the
'carpenter's son of Judea' with the same easy flippancy and scant
reverence as yourself. The 'intellectual minds of the day' to
which you allude, are extraordinarily limited of comprehension,
and none of them, literary or otherwise, have such a grasp of
knowledge as any of these dead and gone authors," and he waved his
hand toward the surrounding loaded bookshelves, "who lived
centuries ago, and are now, as far as the general public is
concerned, forgotten. All the volumes you see here are vellum
manuscripts copied from the original slabs of baked clay, stone
tablets, and engraved sheets of ivory, and among them is an
ingenious treatise by one Remeni Adranos, chief astronomer to the
then king of Babylonia, setting forth the Atom and Evolution
theory with far more clearness and precision than any of your