s strength to sacrifice himself in
part, God will have strength to sacrifice Himself utterly. If He has not
done it, He will do it: or He will be less beautiful, less sublime, less
heavenly, less righteous than my poor conception of Him, ay, than this
weak playful girl! Why should I not believe those who tell me that
He has done it already? What if their evidence be, after all, only
probability? I do not want mathematical demonstration to prove to me
that when a child was in danger his father saved him--neither do I here.
My reason, my heart, every faculty of me, except this stupid sensuous
experience, which I find deceiving me every moment, which cannot even
prove to me my own existence, accepts that story of Calvary as the most
natural, most probable, most necessary of earthly events, assuming only
that God is a righteous Person, and not some dream of an all-pervading
necessary spirit-nonsense which, in its very terms, confesses its own
materialism.'

Hypatia answered with a forced smile.

'Raphael Aben-Ezra has deserted the method of the severe dialectician
for that of the eloquent lover.'

'Not altogether,' said he, smiling in return. 'For suppose that I had
said to myself, We Platonists agree that the sight of God is the highest
good.'

Hypatia once more shuddered at last night's recollections.

'And if He be righteous, and righteousness be--as I know it to
be--identical with love, then He will desire that highest good for men
far more than they can desire it for themselves.... Then He will desire
to show Himself and His own righteousness to them.... Will you make
answer, dearest Hypatia, or shall I?....or does your silence give
consent? At least let me go on to say this, that if God do desire to
show His righteousness to men, His only perfect method, according to
Plato, will be that of calumny, persecution, the scourge, and the cross,
that so He, like Glaucon's righteous man, may remain for ever free from
any suspicion of selfish interest, or weakness of endurance.... Am I
deserting the dialectic method now, Hypatia?.... You are still silent?
You will not hear me, I see.... At some future day, the philosopher may
condescend to lend a kinder ear to the words of her greatest debtor ....
Or, rather, she may condescend to hear, in her own heart, the voice of
that Archetypal Man, who has been loving her, guiding her, heaping her
with every perfection of body and of mind, inspiring her with all pure
and noble long