y. Again and again had Persia changed her national faith. For
the revelation of Zoroaster she had substituted Dualism; then under new
political influences she had adopted Magianism. She had worshiped fire,
and kept her altars burning on mountain-tops. She had adored the sun.
When Alexander came, she was fast falling into pantheism.

On a country to which in its political extremity the indigenous gods
have been found unable to give any protection, a change of faith is
impending. The venerable divinities of Egypt, to whose glory obelisks
had been raised and temples dedicated, had again and again submitted
to the sword of a foreign conqueror. In the land of the Pyramids, the
Colossi, the Sphinx, the images of the gods had ceased to represent
living realities. They had ceased to be objects of faith. Others of more
recent birth were needful, and Serapis confronted Osiris. In the shops
and streets of Alexandria there were thousands of Jews who had forgotten
the God that had made his habitation behind the veil of the temple.

Tradition, revelation, time, all had lost their influence. The
traditions of European mythology, the revelations of Asia, the
time-consecrated dogmas of Egypt, all had passed or were fast passing
away. And the Ptolemies recognized how ephemeral are forms of faith.

But the Ptolemies also recognized that there is something more durable
than forms of faith, which, like the organic forms of geological ages,
once gone, are clean gone forever, and have no restoration, no return.
They recognized that within this world of transient delusions and
unrealities there is a world of eternal truth.

That world is not to be discovered through the vain traditions that
have brought down to us the opinions of men who lived in the morning of
civilization, nor in the dreams of mystics who thought that they were
inspired. It is to be discovered by the investigations of geometry,
and by the practical interrogation of Nature. These confer on humanity
solid, and innumerable, and inestimable blessings.

The day will never come when any one of the propositions of Euclid will
be denied; no one henceforth will call in question the globular shape of
the earth, as recognized by Eratosthenes; the world will not permit
the great physical inventions and discoveries made in Alexandria and
Syracuse to be forgotten. The names of Hipparchus, of Apollonius, of
Ptolemy, of Archimedes, will be mentioned with reverence by men of every
religi