There was in this man still the typical Jew's keen joy in life, and, with the thought of death, he felt chill waves in his hot veins. Death!

He appeared to be swimming in a vast, an infinite, sea of melancholy. He knew from what he had heard

He arose and looked about the cypresses, then at the space behind the seat on which he had been sitting, as if he had expected to find there the hollow-hooded Thanatos himself, with bent form and ready knife.

Death!

Then he cried, "O Adonai, Adonai, 'tis I that worship thee in truth. Wilt thou not hearken unto me? Was it not for my love of thee and for my toughness and my strength that thou didst choose me out of many? Yet knowest thou not that I am but a man? Is my flesh of brass, or my bones of iron that they never can be broke? Yet hast thou given me burdens of hardness- See this triliterate brand upon me! O Adonai! Didst thou give unto me only a covenant of wretchedness?

"I am but a bit of dreaming dust. Hast thou not with me also a covenant of peace? Why should the burden of thy tragic priesthood be ever upon my shoulders alone? Are there not other men? Choose them, therefore, that they may also bear a little. For lo, I shall go down into Hades if I be not very soon at rest.'

Rest? Death!

Somehow, "Death," kept coming up in his mind continually, and he thought long about this thing men call death, or dissolution, yet always in connection, too, with God. And what was God? He began to review the opinions he had long since formed, but, also long since, had well-nigh forgotten, concerning the nature and essence of God. How very differently, now, he conceived of that essence! What was the cause of the change? He searched far down in his consciousness, but could not find the reason.

"God," he thought, is a being absolutely infinite, something which lieth beneath the appearances of things, in fact the only being which lieth beneath the appearance of things. And a portion of this underlying essence is constituted by the minds and souls of men. All else than the Infinite Being are merely appearances.

"God has attributes of which we know but two-thought and extension. God understandeth himself and loveth himself, and therefore our spirits, which are portions of the divine substance, love God and are loved by Him." After a dreary silence, he added: "And we

love one another-we should love one another-even our enemies." Here he paused and pondered long and deeply.

"God, however, hath no will in man's (the temporal) sense. He seeth all things perfect and changeless and wholly co-existent, hence also can He have no future purposes.

"But, in time-the minds that exist in time-these minds are subject necessarily to evil-for that they have temporal wills for the forming of future purposes, which must often fail of completion, hence sin.

"But why should God make man, at first, a temporal creature? Why did he make space? First of all, Why time? What can justify the creation of that thing which seemeth to set the spirit of man (which is temporal) apart from that of God (which is eternal) ?"

Some dim conception of the wish of the Lord to present Himself in certain loving relations to His own temporal manifestations began to take vague shape in his staggering imagination.

"How could the highest love come into existence? In what way? In what way?"

He recalled again, as on the darkening hour of the crucifixion, and on each of the specially sorrowful days whenafter he had met that bearer of the secular light, even Lampadephorus, the teaching of Anaxagoras, which saith that many of the stars are worlds quite like our own, and that they may perchance be inhabited by people of like passions with ourselves. In such a case would not Adonai be obliged, would He not even wish- Stepping from star to star, throughout the ages, from crucifixion unto crucifixion, He

Would not this explain the mystery of space and time, the multitude of planets and the lamps of heaven which shine upon them—a mystery which had been so baffling unto children and philosophers!

He began to feel that he had wandered far from the teachings of Parush, had added very much even to the teachings of Moses. And he would have tried to prove the questions more, but that, from a region just beyond his own outermost wall, a strange complaining sound arose again, clearly of mechanical origin, and yet, in a way, bearing a poignant resemblance to the heart-broken cry which he himself would have uttered an if he could-the cry of a person whose burden was almost greater than could be borne. Ophidion-it came from the house of Ophidion, one of that basest creature's outlying courts. And, after all, was he himself any better than a treadmill servant of Ophidion? Was he not, at Ophidion's behest, merely working a drear treadmill unto Cæsar? Only, the mill which he, Simon, treaded, had golden steps instead of wood. And, worn out, at the end-the mines,

The man of the cross further, but, with a

the cross! Oh God! Oh Adonai! Why should son of Abraham be servant to Ophidion? But-was not Ophidion a servant unto the Lord? Yea, though he, Ophidion, knew it not. suffered himself to think upon this thing no proud despair, began to recall (as often he had done before in this very viridarium) all the skeptical philosophers (and that was a many) whose works he had aforetime read, as, for example, Lucretius, Ænesidemus, etc. Then he said, "I am a fool that I believe on anything whatever. Yea, I will not believe, and I do not. Two things exist, they two alone-Cæsar and I. And I must escape from Cæsar. So much is plain, no more.

"Why! Now I do begin to breathe easily again. So fearful had I become that I had fallen into an idolatrous anti-idolatry. Shall I make of my fear of thee, O Christ, an idol the which I shall worship? Have I not been doing this very thing? So foolish had I become! and, at bottom, truly for this, that I had believed on God, and had thought that a man might know the things that are to be hereafter. But man knoweth nothing, even of the things of now.

"This is the simple truth. Therefore will I believe it utterly, and the truth shall make me free."

Now, deep in the heart of the Jew (as in the heart of every normal man, but not so strong and abiding) was a wish to see God, to behold Him even as a brother, whom one might, indeed, take by the hand and kiss. "Oh that One might come with supernatural tenderness and with supernatural power, even as Socrates and Plato did predict must be!" At the bottom of his soul, it was this feeling (righteous enough in itself) which, by a strange and yet most natural excess, had made of Simon, both in Egypt and in Petra, also in the Land of Canaan, an idolater veritable. This, too, by a strange reversal, or inversion, of thought, had made of the man an idolater also since his coming into Rome, and for this, that (as he himself had plainly seen) it had caused a fear of his own possible reception of Jesus, until, in his heart, he worshipped not the very Lord, but that fear itself and that hatred of Christ. And now, as his love of Adonai and wish to see Him in the flesh was tapping at his heart's door, he closed down even the window, shutting and fastening it, and making an absolute darkness therein, and saying to himself: "There is nothing at all that can be without, therefore none knocketh." So again he hath an idol, this Simon of Cyrene, the idol called Atheism. Poor Simon of Cyrene!-Simon which loveth the Lord better than doth any other man alive. Incurable idolater also he, and solely for this strange reason, that so very much he doth love God.

And Simon indeed suffered.

Not without suffering could Simon of Cyrene have said to himself, "There is no God."

After a little, he found (and was greatly surprised) that he had not quieted the great question in the least, but was wondering about it again, and tossing it like a madman's ball, to and fro, in his mind.

There came to him the recollection of what the Chazzan, what the Archisynagogus, what Jeezer and Morah and Jehovah-Jireh had said unto him as about Jesus. With a pang, he suddenly cast these things all out from his heart, crying again: "I have said I would not so much as believe upon Jehovah. Why, then, ponder, or anywise recall, the prophecies about His Son?"

So he put the whole question by, saying: "I will see to this at my greater leisure, for unto some certain conclusion must I arrive." But all at once he found that he was reflecting again upon Christianity. And after a time, his imagination stopped once more.

There was a strange, uncertain region (as he saw) which it could not cross, being under, as it seemed, a heavy compulsion and restraint. Sometimes again, he believed that he could cross that region -but only with superhuman aid.

And a sudden homesickness, a sickness for the Land of his Fathers, of Canaan, descended upon him like a leaden cloud. "Were I only in Canaan," thought he, "the troubles and the trials of my life would surely and forever cease.

But he swept this thought, also, aside, saying: "Two things exist alone-Cæsar and I. And I must make peace with Cæsar." So that now, in his soul, which was verging unto dissolution (but he knew that not) from his body, and which, as it were, should have been transformed into a very temple prepared for Adonai, there grew up merely thoughts and plans for that body's safety and fleshly success.

But again he began, spite of himself, to think of God, and of God in connection with him, Simon. He reviewed his whole life, calling up before him Leah, which is also Berith, likewise Temunah of the South, and Emah the Egyptian, and Gillul, the Petran, and Abaddone and her brother Shikkuts, and Superbus and Superbia, and all the others of the seven strange peoples that were dead and dust (he thought) these very many years. Then he became aware again that a nightingale was calling to its mate outside the grove, a little later that the treadmill in the near-by court was creaking still, creaking and creaking steadfastly. He straightened slowly up, and stood upon his feet, for he found that he himself had gotten into the bent, tread

mill attitude. "Small wonder," quoth he. He raised his arms, in the fashion of a giant cross.

In this strange posture he stood, devoid of motion, for a long time, looking like some one that posed and passed from dream unto idler dream, but, in reality, his was a wounded soul naked, out of space and time, battling against Jesus.

He let fall his arms, and passed back into the world again, coming outside the circle of the cypresses. Then he paced the walks of the lonely court, marching restlessly from closed door to closed door and from closed door back unto closed door again, till, in his teeming brain, he had formed highly thought out plans-plans, that is to say, both as concerning great changes for himself and his familia and also as concerning Ophidion.

CHAPTER XLIX

AND IT CAME TO PASS

CONATUS, meanwhile, threaded the many courts sombrely, seeing to it that all went well in the house of him that had borne, and still bore, the cross. Then, once more in the atrium, he heard his Master's rich, mellifluous voice coming nearer and nearer, ringing out as in the time before the Trial, hymning the great joys of the synagogue.

Conatus ran up by the stairway at the side wall of the court, and so to his cubiculum. He cast his olden garments off, and put on fresher, and leaped and capered like a young he-goat, and put his fists up in the manner of pugilists, and battered first this, then that, airy and insubstantial opponent-as, to wit, Potus, Ebrius, Tepor, Cessatio, Prodigus, and even Ophidion (the father of fools) himself.

Then he sate down, and indited an epistle to ChristopherusChristopherus, who had known this very long time (but Simon not at all) that Conatus and Trivialis were one and the same very man.

And, in those days, Sarcogenes, which was also Ophidion, set on foot (but by merest indirections) movements among the Christians in Rome, looking toward the conversion of Simon. He said to them he sent, "If ye get him to be a Christian, see ye unto it that he falleth away from righteousness. Teach him, in the very bosom of the Church, lust, polygamy, theft, lying, the rapine of whole provinces, fearfullest murders. Justify ye all these things by distorting the sense of the Scriptures, in especial the olden, which lendeth itself more readily to distortion in these matters than doth the new."