necessity for food and drink, yet never provide for them the one nor the
other, but leave them all to die of hunger. Unless there is a future
life, we all die of a worse hunger. Unless there is a future life, man is
a monster in creation--compared with other things, an abortion--and in
himself, and compared with himself, an enigma--a riddle--which no human
wit has ever solved, nor can ever hope to solve.'

'This seems unanswerable,' said Fausta; 'yet is it no objection to all
such arguments, which we ourselves construct, that the thing they
establish is too great and good almost to be believed, without some divine
warrant? It does to me appear almost or quite presumptuous to think, that
for me there is by the gods prepared a world of never-fading light, and a
never-ending joy.'

'When,' replied the Greek, 'we look at the lower forms of man which fall
under our observation, I confess that the objection which you urge strikes
me with some force. But when I think that it is for beings like you to
whom I speak, for whom another and fairer world is to be prepared, it
loses again much of its force. And when I think of the great and good of
other times, of Homer and Hesiod, of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Socrates
and Plato, and of what the mind of man has in them, and in others as great
and good, accomplished, the objection which you urge loses all its force.
I see and feel that man has been made not altogether unworthy of a longer
life and a happier lot than earth affords. And in regard to the ignorant,
the low, and the almost or quite savage, we are to consider that the same
powers and affections are in them as in us, and that their inferiority to
us is not intrinsic and essential, but as it were accidental. The
difference between the soul of Plato and yonder Ethiopian slave is not in
any original faculty or power; the slave here equals the philosopher; but
in this, that the faculties and powers of Plato were strengthened, and