had done since he sat upon his nurse's
knee, and heard legends about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. What
if Augustine were right after all? What if the Jehovah of the old
Scriptures were not merely the national patron of the children of
Abraham, as the Rabbis held; not merely, as Philo held, the Divine
Wisdom which inspired a few elect sages, even among the heathen; but the
Lord of the whole earth, and of the nations thereof?--And suddenly,
for the first time in his life, passages from the psalms and prophets
flashed across him, which seemed to assert this. What else did that
whole book of Daniel and the history of Nebuchadnezzar mean--if not
that? Philosophic latitudinarianism had long ago cured him of the
Rabbinical notion of the Babylonian conqueror as an incarnate fiend,
devoted to Tophet, like Sennacherib before him. He had long in private
admired the man, as a magnificent human character, a fairer one, in his
eyes, than either Alexander or Julius Caesar.... What if Augustine had
given him a hint which might justify his admiration?.... But more.
.... What if Augustine were right in going even further than Philo and
Hypatia? What if this same Jehovah, Wisdom, Logos, call Him what they
might, were actually the God of the spirits, as well as of the bodies
of all flesh? What if he was as near--Augustine said that He was--to the
hearts of those wild Markmen, Gauls, Thracians, as to Augustine's
own heart? What if He were--Augustine said He was--yearning after,
enlightening, leading home to Himself, the souls of the poorest, the
most brutal, the most sinful?--What if He loved man as man, and not
merely one favoured race or one favoured class of minds?.... And in the
light of that hypothesis, that strange story of the Cross of Calvary
seemed not so impossible after all.... But then, celibacy and
asceticism, utterly non-human as they were, what had they to do with the
theory of a human God?

And filled with many questionings, Raphael was not sorry to have the
matter brought to an issue that very evening in Synesius's sitting-room.
Majoricus, in his blunt, soldierlike way, set Raphael and Augustine at
each other without circumlocution; and Raphael, after trying to smile
and pooh-pooh away the subject, was tempted to make a jest on a seeming
fallacious conceit of Augustine's--found it more difficult than he
thought to trip up the serious and wary logician, lost his temper a
little--a sign, perhaps, of returning health in a