freshening the air all around; these
caverns grow darker and closer, until you find yourself among animals
that shun the daylight, adhering to the walls, hissing along the
bottom, flapping, screeching, gaping, glaring, making you shrink at
the sounds, and sicken at the smells, and afraid to advance or
retreat.

_Timotheus._ To what can this refer? Our caverns open on verdure, and
terminate in veins of gold.

_Lucian._ Veins of gold, my good Timotheus, such as your excavations
have opened and are opening, in the spirit of avarice and ambition,
will be washed (or as you would say, _purified_) in streams of blood.
Arrogance, intolerance, resistance to authority and contempt of law,
distinguish your aspiring sectarians from the other subjects of the
empire.

_Timotheus._ Blindness hath often a calm and composed countenance;
but, my Cousin Lucian! it usually hath also the advantage of a
cautious and a measured step. It hath pleased God to blind you, like
all the other adversaries of our faith; but He has given you no staff
to lean upon. You object against us the very vices from which we are
peculiarly exempt.

_Lucian._ Then it is all a story, a fable, a fabrication, about one of
your earlier leaders cutting off with his sword a servant's ear? If
the accusation is true, the offence is heavy. For not only was the
wounded man innocent of any provocation, but he is represented as
being in the service of the high priest at Jerusalem. Moreover, from
the direction and violence of the blow, it is evident that his life
was aimed at. According to law, you know, my dear cousin, all the
party might have been condemned to death, as accessories to an attempt
at murder. I am unwilling to think so unfavourably of your sect; nor
indeed do I see the possibility that, in such an outrage, the
principal could be pardoned. For any man but a soldier to go about
armed is against the Roman law, which, on that head, as on many
others, is borrowed from the Athenian; and it is incredible that in
any civilized country so barbarous a practice can be tolerated.
Travellers do indeed relate that, in certain parts of India, there are
princes at whose courts even civilians are armed. But _traveller_ has
occasionally the same signification as _liar_, and _India_ as _fable_.
However, if the practice really does exist in that remote and rarely
visited country, it must be in some region of it very far beyond the
Indus or the Ganges: for the nations situate