“That wondering is easily met; they had, as god, one whose head could be broken as this one’s was; they that would survive must be sheltered by the Invincible.”
Rizpah, meanwhile had drawn close to the huge stone face and placing one hand beneath the mouth, the other on the portion of the head just above the moon crown, her arms stretched well nigh to their limits quizically remarked:
“Those that dined with her must have had pyramids for chairs. What dost thou think they were like?”
“Crusaders?”
“Now, I’m tantalized. Crusaders two or three thousand years ago? How absurd!”
“Oh, certainly they were not known by the name, Crusaders: but they that followed Astarte and such-like deities, whether called Kenaihites, Rephaim, Moslem, Christians, or by other appellation are all soldier-pilgrims, dominated by an ideal. There have been many female deities among the pagans and there is a deal of paganism left in humanity.”
“That’s because half the race are men. Astarte would be very popular to-day with thy sex, if she were here in living form, a whole woman, instead of a fragment and beautiful also—”
“Thou dost not care to hear more of the female deities?”
“Oh, yes; I’ll be fearfully jealous if thou dost keep any thing back. Tell me what madmen the ancients were?” She paused, slapped the face of the image, ejaculating “Virago!” then continued, “Why did they make their effigy both hideous and huge? Ugly things should be dwarfed!”
“The ancients, who knew not the grandeur of moral power, gave their deities terribleness in their physical proportions, and a mountain of flesh became their ideal of greatness—men ever try to make their objects of worship greater than themselves, thou knowest. Hast forgotten what Ichabod once told us of the Egyptians? How they expressed their reverence by piling up pyramids and made that very diminutive which they would caricature? Oh, how our true religion, having at its heart an only, all-beautiful, Almighty God, rises above these human devices!”