, do you continue to dissemble or to distort
the truth? The shreds are become a cable for the faithful. That they
were miraculously turned into one entire garment who shall gainsay?
How many hath it already clothed with righteousness? Happy men,
casting their doubts away before it! Who knows, O Cousin Lucian, but
on some future day you yourself will invoke the merciful interposition
of Aulus!

_Lucian._ Possibly: for if ever I fall among thieves, nobody is
likelier to be at the head of them.

_Timotheus._ Uncharitable man! how suspicious! how ungenerous! how
hardened in unbelief! Reason is a bladder on which you may paddle like
a child as you swim in summer waters: but, when the winds rise and the
waves roughen, it slips from under you, and you sink; yes, O Lucian,
you sink into a gulf whence you never can emerge.

_Lucian._ I deem those the wisest who exert the soonest their own
manly strength, now with the stream and now against it, enjoying the
exercise in fine weather, venturing out in foul, if need be, yet
avoiding not only rocks and whirlpools, but also shallows. In such a
light, my cousin, I look on your dispensations. I shut them out as we
shut out winds blowing from the desert; hot, debilitating, oppressive,
laden with impalpable sands and pungent salts, and inflicting an
incurable blindness.

_Timotheus._ Well, Cousin Lucian! I can bear all you say while you are
not witty. Let me bid you farewell in this happy interval.

_Lucian._ Is it not serious and sad, O my cousin, that what the Deity
hath willed to lie incomprehensible in His mysteries, we should fall
upon with tooth and nail, and ferociously growl over, or ignorantly
dissect?

_Timotheus._ Ho! now you come to be serious and sad, there are hopes
of you. Truth always begins or ends so.

_Lucian._ Undoubtedly. But I think it more reverential to abstain from
that which, with whatever effort, I should never understand.

_Timotheus._ You are lukewarm, my cousin, you are lukewarm. A most
dangerous state.

_Lucian._ For milk to continue in, not for men. I would not fain be
frozen or scalded.

_Timotheus._ Alas! you are blind, my sweet cousin!

_Lucian._ Well; do not open my eyes with pincers, nor compose for them
a collyrium of spurge.

May not men eat and drink and talk together, and perform in relation
one to another all the duties of social life, whose opinions are
different on things immediately under their eyes? If they can and do,
surely