 elect sages, even among the heathen; but the Lord of the whole earth, and of the nations thereof?—And suddenly, for the first time in his life, passages from the psalms and prophets flashed across him, which seemed to assert this. What else did that whole book of Daniel and the history of Nebuchadnezzar mean—if not that? Philosophic latitudinarianism had long ago cured him of the Rabbinical notion of the Babylonian conqueror as an incarnate fiend, devoted to Tophet, like Sennacherib before him. He had long in private admired the man, as a magnificent human character, a fairer one, in his eyes, than either Alexander or Julius Caesar.... What if Augustine had given him a hint which might justify his admiration?.... But more. .... What if Augustine were right in going even further than Philo and Hypatia? What if this same Jehovah, Wisdom, Logos, call Him what they might, were actually the God of the spirits, as well as of the bodies of all flesh? What if he was as near—Augustine said that He was—to the hearts of those wild Markmen, Gauls, Thracians, as to Augustine's own heart? What if He were—Augustine said He was—yearning after, enlightening, leading home to Himself, the souls of the poorest, the most brutal, the most sinful?—What if He loved man as man, and not merely one favoured race or one favoured class of minds?.... And in the light of that hypothesis, that strange story of the Cross of Calvary seemed not so impossible after all.... But then, celibacy and asceticism, utterly non-human as they were, what had they to do with the theory of a human God?
And filled with many questionings, Raphael was not sorry to have the matter brought to an issue that very evening in Synesius's sitting-room. Majoricus, in his blunt, soldierlike way, set Raphael and Augustine at each other without circumlocution; and Raphael, after trying to smile and pooh-pooh away the subject, was tempted to make a jest on a seeming fallacious conceit of Augustine's—found it more difficult than he thought to trip up the serious and wary logician, lost his temper a little—a sign, perhaps, of returning health in a sceptic—and soon found himself fighting desperately, with Synesius backing him, apparently for the mere pleasure of seeing a battle, and Majoricus making him more and more cross by the implicit dogmatic faith with which he hewed at one Gordian knot after another, till Augustine had to save himself from his
