“We may not eat of it,” replied Elisama; “it is [unclean]. It is forbidden in the law to eat any animal, which ruminates without dividing the hoof.”[[22]]

“Ye are then worse off even than the Egyptians,” said Myron, “who are only forbidden to eat their sacred animals. We Greeks are wiser than either: we eat what we like.”

“And do what ye like;” interposed Helon. “But we have the law.”

“And what need,” said Myron, “of any other law than that which is written in the hearts of all men?”

“Yet that this law, written in the heart, is not of itself sufficient, and does not supersede the necessity of a revealed law, you might have learnt from your own Socrates. Remember what he says of his dæmon.”

“If the Jew attempts to turn the weapons of the heathen against himself, let us see if the heathen cannot do the same with those of the Jew. Ye call Abraham the progenitor of your people.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Elisama.

“Did he not live many hundred years before the law was given by Moses? If so, which you cannot deny, this progenitor, whom ye prize so highly, and exalt above all men that ever lived, had not even heard of the law, and was no better than one of us.”

Helon was for a while silent and perplexed. At length he replied, “The example of our father Abraham urges us to obedience to the law: for circumcision, which is a leading part of it, was commanded to him, and he performed it on all his house on the same day on which Jehovah made a covenant with him and changed his name.”[[23]]

“I will give thee a better answer,” interposed Elisama. “It is true, that Abraham had not the law of Moses, and could not, in our sense of the word, exhibit the righteousness of the law. He received the commands of the Lord immediately from himself, and therefore needed not that they should be engraved on tables of stone. And for the same reason he was permitted to sacrifice elsewhere than in Jerusalem, though his greatest and most costly sacrifice, that of his son, was appointed to be performed on [Moriah], the hill where our temple stands. The Lord, who himself gave him the law, was every where with him, in Egypt as in Mamre. But now, since Israel has been stained with sin, the glory of Jehovah will dwell only on his own holy hill; and it is our duty to repair to Jerusalem and bring thither our offerings.”