‘They would have been savoury enough, I will warrant, after they had passed under your magical hand.’
‘It is a comfort, certainly, to find that after all one did learn something useful in Alexandria! So I will even go forward at once, and employ my artistic skill.’
‘Tell me first what it was about which I heard you just now soliloquising, as so hopeful a view of some matter or other?’
‘Honestly—if you will neither betray me to your son and daughter, nor consider me as having in anywise committed myself—it was Paul of Tarsus’s notion of the history and destinies of our stiff-necked nation. See what your daughter has persuaded me into reading!’ And he held up a manuscript of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
‘It is execrable Greek. But it is sound philosophy, I cannot deny. He knows Plato better than all the ladies and gentlemen in Alexandria put together, if my opinion on the point be worth having.’
‘I am a plain soldier, and no judge on that point, sir. He may or may not know Plato; but I am right sure that he knows God.’
‘Not too fast,’ said Raphael with a smile. ‘You do not know, perhaps, that I have spent the last ten years of my life among men who professed the same knowledge?’
‘Augustine, too, spent the best ten years of his life among such; and yet he is now combating the very errors which he once taught.’
‘Having found, he fancies, something better!’
‘Having found it, most truly. But you must talk to him yourself, and argue the matter over, with one who can argue. To me such questions are an unknown land.’