ir sex; but these Jewish women--the women of his race--seemed to
him as gross in their minds as in their bodies, and it surprised him to
find that though many men seemed to think as he did about these women,
they were not repelled as he was, but accepted them willingly, even
greedily, as instruments of pleasure and afterwards as mothers of
children. But I am not as these men are, he said; my father must bear
his sorrow like another; and in meditation it seemed to him that it
would not be reasonable that his father should get everything he desired
and his son nothing.

His father had gotten more out of life than ever he should get; he would
have his son till he died (so far as he could he would secure him that
satisfaction), and after death this world and its shows concern us not.
But it may well be that we die out of one life to be born into another
life, that everything that passes is replaced by an equivalent, he said,
repeating the words of a Greek philosopher to whom he had been much
addicted in happy days gone by, and that reality is but an eternal
shaping and reshaping of things. All that is beyond doubt, he continued,
is that things pass too quickly for us to have any certain knowledge of
them, our only standard being our own flitting impressions; and as all
men bring a different sensitiveness into the world, knowledge is a word
without meaning, for there can be no knowledge. Every race is possessed
of a different sensitiveness, he said, as he passed up the Mount of
Olives on his way home. We ask for miracles, but the Greeks are
satisfied with reason. Am I Greek or Jew? he asked, for he was looking
forward to some silent hours with a book of Greek philosophy and hoped
to forget himself in the manuscript. But he could not always keep his
thoughts on the manuscript, and, forgetful of Heraclitus, he often sat
thinking of Jesus' promise--that one morning men would awake to find
that God had come to judge the world and divide it among those that
repented their sins. He remembered he had forfeited his share in the
Kingdom for his father's sake, or had he been driven out of the
community because his belief in the coming of the Kingdom was
insufficient? It is true that his belief had wavered, but he had always
believed. Even his natural humility, of which he was conscious, did not
allow him to doubt that his belief in Jesus was less fervid than that of
Peter, James, John and the residue. The conviction was always quick in