And much after the same manner as Buddha had spoken this man spoke,
of the high duty of manhood, of the splendour of justice, of the
certainty of retribution, and of the true meaning of Progress and
Freedom, the noblest reaches of which are spiritual, transcending
all the baser and meaner utilities of the physical nature. And
when the high priests of Science, not like the priests of Indra
in older tines, answered the prophet disdainfully and without shame,
that they knew nothing of any spiritual utilities, because they
believed in evolution and held man to be only a developed ape, with
no more soul than his ancestor, the stranger responded that he too
was an Evolutionist, but that he understood the doctrine quite
differently from them, and more after the fashion of the old
teachers,--Pythagoras, Plato, Hermes, and Buddha. And that the
living and incorruptible Spirit of God was in all things, whether
ape or man, whether beast or human; ay, and in the very flowers
and grass of the field, and in every element of all that is ignorantly
thought to be dead and inert matter. So that the soul of man, he
said, is one with the soul that is in all Nature,
only that when man is truly human, in him alone the soul becomes
self-knowing and self-concentrated; the mirror of Heaven, and the
focus of the Divine Light. And he declared, moreover, that the
spiritual evolution of which he spoke was not so much promoted by
intellectual knowledge as by moral goodness; that it was possible
to be a very learned ape indeed, but in no wise to deserve the name
of man; and that inasmuch as any person was disposed to sacrifice
the higher to the lower reason, and to rank intellectual above
spiritual attainment, insomuch that person was still an ape and
had not developed humanity.

Now, the stranger who was brave enough to say all this was no other