? Let them have conquered the inward enemies, what
matter to them if the outward enemies seemed to prevail for a moment?
They should be recompensed at the resurrection of the just, when death
was swallowed up in victory. It would be seen then who had really
conquered in the eyes of the just God--they, God's ministers,
the defenders of peace and justice, or the Ausurians, the enemies
thereof.... And then, by some quaintest turn of fancy, he introduced a
word of pity and hope, even for the wild Moorish robbers. It might be
good for them to have succeeded thus far; they might learn from their
Christian captives, purified by affliction, truths which those captives
had forgotten in prosperity. And, again, it might be good for them, as
well as for Christians, to be confounded and made like chaff before the
wind, that so they too might learn His Name....And so on, through and
in spite of all conceits, allegories, overstrained interpretations,
Augustine went on evolving from the Psalms, and from the past, and from
the future, the assertion of a Living, Present God, the eternal enemy of
discord, injustice, and evil, the eternal helper and deliverer of those
who were enslaved and crushed thereby in soul or body.... It was all
most strange to Raphael.... Strange in its utter unlikeness to any
teaching, Platonist or Hebrew, which he had ever heard before, and
stranger still in its agreement with those teachings; in the instinctive
ease with which it seemed to unite and justify them all by the talisman
of some one idea--and what that might be, his Jewish prejudices could
not prevent his seeing, and yet would not allow him to acknowledge. But,
howsoever he might redden with Hebrew pride; howsoever he might long
to persuade himself that Augustine was building up a sound and right
practical structure on the foundation of a sheer lie; he could not help
watching, at first with envy, and then with honest pleasure, the
faces of the rough soldiers, as they gradually lightened up into fixed
attention, into cheerful and solemn resolve.

'What wonder?' said Raphael to himself, 'what wonder, after all? He has
been speaking to these wild beasts as to sages and saints; he has
been telling them that God is as much with them as with prophets and
psalmists.... I wonder if Hypatia, with all her beauty, could have
touched their hearts as he has done?'

And when Raphael rose at the end of this strange discourse, he felt more
like an old Hebrew than he