opinion! And how
amusing it is to listen when the Platonists on the one hand and the
Aristotelians on the other, among the busy threshers of straw in the
Museum at Alexandria, fall together by the ears so vehemently that they
would both enjoy flinging their metal cups at each others' heads--if
the loss of the wine, which I pay for, were not too serious to bear. We
still seek for truth; the Jews believe they possess it entirely.

"Even those among them who most zealously study our philosophers believe
this; and yet the writers of this book know of nothing but actual
present, and their god--who will no more endure another god as his
equal than a citizen's wife will admit a second woman to her husband's
house--is said to have created the world out of nothing for no other
purpose but to be worshipped and feared by its inhabitants.

"Now, given a philosophical Jew who knows his Empedocles--and I grant
there are many such in Alexandria, extremely keen and cultivated
men--what idea can he form in his own mind of 'creation out of nothing?'
Must he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the
fundamental axiom that 'out of nothing, nothing can come,' and that
nothing which has once existed can ever be completely annihilated? At
any rate the necessary deduction must be that the life of man ends in
that nothingness whence everything in existence has proceeded. To live
and to die according to this book is not highly profitable. I can easily
reconcile myself to the idea of annihilation, as a man who knows how to
value a dreamless sleep after a day brimful of enjoyment--as a man who
if he must cease to be Euergetes would rather spring into the open jaws
of nothingness--but as a philosopher, no, never!"

"You, it is true," replied the queen, "cannot help measuring all and
everything by the intellectual standard exclusively; for the gods, who
endowed you with gifts beyond a thousand others, struck with blindness
or deafness that organ which conveys to our minds any religious or moral
sentiment. If that could see or hear, you could no more exclude the
conviction that these writings are full of the deepest purport than I
can, nor doubt that they have a powerful hold on the mind of the reader.

"They fetter their adherents to a fixed law, but they take all
bitterness out of sorrow by teaching that a stern father sends us
suffering which is represented as being sometimes a means of education,
and sometimes a punishment for tr