roofed cot under a sycamore tree, a waggon-load of books, a crust of bread, three congenial friends, one loveable woman, and some joyous children. Be happy!" This is what Saladin would say to Jehovah were Jehovah Saladin and Saladin Jehovah.
Are you, the Lord of heaven and earth, meaner and more revengeful than I, only a poor student, ever chafing earnestly, but in vain, against the impalpable but impassable portcullis of Mystery? I cannot, I will not believe it. If, for doing my earnest, anxious best, you would send me to hell, you are a smaller and meaner thing than I am, and I fear you not. Come before you when I may, I come before you in my honest, if erring, integrity, and order me to hell at your peril. If you do so, I will know from your sentence that I am greater and stronger and more magnanimous than you. And, in the spirit of the best of my race, in the spirit of the heroic living and of the mighty dead who still rule us from their graves, I shall make a Heaven, and a heaven alone. I shall make Evil perish and make Good eternal, and make every star in the universe revolve and keep time to the pæan of Happiness and the anthem of Love. I should lead the very damned from the Lake of Fire to streams of cool water murmuring through green meadows, kissed by the purplest sunshine, and gemmed with immortal flowers. Having founded a universal Heaven, I should fling open the gate of glory to receive the triumphal march of the world. All this would I do. Would you do less? No; you will do more than I can think or dream, and that independently of the poor, paltry belief in Bibles and the turning of the eye of credulity to a distant and obscure land and time and a poor victim bleeding and dying upon a tree.
To those who can pierce through the outward seeming to the inner soul, I write for the vindication, not for the destruction, of God. Behind the veil there stands the awful Eidolon, the Pleroma filling more than conceivable Space, dispensing with the conditions of Form, and obtruding beyond the upper and nether ring of Eternity.
THE END.
