beautiful, the true, the good--yes, our religion was divine."

"It had only one fault," interrupted my guide.

"What was that?" I inquired, without knowing what his answer would be.

"It was not true."

"But I still believe in Apollo," I exclaimed; "he is not dead, I know
he is alive."

"Prove it," he said to me; then, pausing for a moment, "if you produce
him," he said, "we shall all fall down and worship him. Produce Apollo
and he shall be our god."

"Produce him!" I whispered to myself. "What blasphemy!" Then, taking
heart, I told my guide how more than once I had felt Apollo's radiant
presence in my heart, and told him of the immortal lines of Homer
concerning the divine Apollo. "Do you doubt Homer?" I said to him;
"Homer, the inspired bard? Homer, whose inkwell was as big as the sea;
whose imperishable page was Time? Homer, whose every word was a drop
of light?" Then I proceeded to quote from Homer's _Iliad_, the Greek
Bible, worshipped by all the Hellenes as the rarest Manuscript between
heaven and earth. I quoted his description of Apollo, than whose lyre
nothing is more musical, than whose speech even honey is not sweeter.
I recited how his mother went from town to town to select a worthy
place to give birth to the young god, son of Zeus, the Supreme Being,
and how he was born and cradled amid the ministrations of all the
goddesses, who bathed him in the running stream and fed him with
nectar and ambrosia from Olympus. Then I recited the lines which