ot to philosophize, Madame," he answered smiling. "But,
even in ordinary conversation, I suppose one may be permitted to remind
the other of contradictions in which he has involved himself. Does he
who has just told you that he feels no want, needs no consolation, seem
poor in your eyes? Then see how ill it fares with the toleration of
which you boasted. You allow every form of faith to exist, except that
which acknowledges it has nothing that resembles a creed. The jew, the
mussulman, the fire-worshipper, the idolater, who sees his God in a
stock or stone--all seem respectable to you, and none so poor as an
honest seeker after truth, who studies nature and his own heart, and
cannot think all the signs and wonders he there beholds explained, when
he uses for them a formula which means anything or nothing. Can you
really consider it of any importance, that I should use the same word,
if to me it expresses something totally different? Do you feel allied
to an idolater, because in his language he gives a block of wood the
same name that to you in yours, means the creator of heaven and earth?
Would you not, though you might respect his conviction, have greater
reason to say to him: 'Poor, poor mortal!'--?"

"'Blessed are the poor in spirit!'" she replied. "You certainly will
not question those words, neither will you deny that every religious
feeling springs from the consciousness of our own incompleteness, that
he who lacks nothing, who is sufficient unto himself, cannot know the
loftiest emotion: devotion to something loftier, richer, stronger--the
ideal of what is highest and noblest, which we call God. And therefore
the idolater stands nearer to me than the atheist. He shares with me
the human need of worshipping, of bowing before some powerful,
inscrutable being. Is he to blame if his ideas of this dim power are so
narrow and gloomy, that in order to be able to reverence something, he
forgets that he carved these gods himself?"

"Certainly not," replied Edwin gravely. "As little as you are to blame,
for adoring a God you have carved yourself or rather suffered others to
fashion. Oh! my honored friend, do not be angry with me, but the
difference between the poor doll that the south sea islander believes
to be the creator of the world, and the God of our ordinary
christianity, does not seem to me great enough to create such a stir.
Are not both carved after _our_ pattern, one more rudely, the other
more delicately, the