"He," replied his friend, "always wanted to be coming forward in the light of a supernatural being: he was evermore labouring, consciously and purposely, to appear as a messenger from Heaven, and with counterfeit splendour to dazzle the ordinary sons of men. He delighted in pomp; he would indeed be condescending at times, but it was only to make the enormous distance between him and us more palpably felt. Did he not revel in the admiration which the nobles and citizens, the young and old, were all forced to pay him? But my present friend (for such he is, because he renders himself altogether my equal) has no wish to seem great and sublime: he smiles at the endeavours of so many men to do so, and considers this of itself as an assurance that there is something spurious and hollow to be concealed; since a clear consciousness of worth would only wish to pass for what it feels itself to be, and the wisest of mortals must after all acknowledge that he too, as well as the most ignorant vagabond, is merely a child of the dust."
"You make me curious;" said Antonio: "so he knows both what is past and what is to come? the destinies of men? and could tell me how happy or unhappy the cast of my future life is to be? whether certain secret wishes can be accomplisht? Would he then be able to decipher and divine such parts of my history as are obscure even to myself?"
"It is in this very thing that his wisdom lies," answered Alfonso with enthusiasm; "by means of letters and numbers, in the simplest and most harmless way, he finds out everything for which those wretches have to employ conjurations and charms and yells and screams and the agonies of death. Hence too you will find none of that odious magical apparatus about him, no crystals with spirits blockt up in them, no mirrors and skeletons, no incense, and no nauseous imps: he has all his stores in himself. I told him about you; and he found out by his calculations that I was quite sure of meeting you today at this hour on the steps of the Lateran church. And so it has turned out at the very instant he foretold."
Antonio was desirous of becoming acquainted with this wonderfully gifted old man, in the hope of learning his destiny from him. They dined in a garden, and toward evening went back to the city. The streets had grown somewhat quieter; they could pursue their way with less hinderance. At dusk they came into the allies which pass close behind the tomb of Augustus. They walkt through a little garden; a friendly light glimmered upon them from the windows of a small house. They pulled the bell; the door opened; and full of the strangest and highest expectations Antonio entered with his friend into the hall.
Antonio was surprised at seeing before him a simple-mannered middle-sized young man, who from his appearance could not be much above thirty years old. With an unaffected air he greeted the youth on his entrance like an old acquaintance.
"Be welcome!" said he with a pleasing voice: "your Spanish friend has told me much good of you, so that I have long lookt forward with pleasure to becoming acquainted with you. Only you must by no means fancy that you are come to one of the sages, to an adept, or forsooth to a man before whom hell trembles in its foundations: you will find me a mere mortal, such as you yourself are and may become, as may every man whom such graver studies, and retirement from the vain tumult of the world, do not scare away."
Antonio felt comfortable and at ease, greatly as he was astonisht: he cast his eyes round the room, which beside a few books and a lute displayed nothing out of the way. In his own mind he compared this little house and its straightforward inmate with the palace and the pomp, the instruments and the mysteries, of his former teacher, and said: "In truth one sees no traces here of that high and hidden knowledge which my friend has been extolling to me, and in which you are said to be infallible."
Castalio laught heartily, and then replied: "No, my young friend, not infallible; no mortal can go so far as that. Only look around you; this is my sitting-room; there in that little chamber stands my bed: I have neither space nor means for hiding any instruments of fraud, or setting any artificial machinery in action. All those circles and glasses, those celestial globes and maps of the stars, which your conjurers need for their tricks, would find no room here: and those poor creatures after all are only deluded by the spirit of falsehood, because they will not labour to learn the powers of their own minds. He however who descends into the depths of his own soul, with humility and a pious disposition to guide him, he who is in earnest in wishing to know himself, will at the same time find every thing here which he would vainly strive by desperate means and devices to extort from Heaven and Hell. _Become like children._ In this exhortation the whole mystery lies hidden. Only let our feelings be pure, and we may again, even though it be but for hours or moments, cast off all that our first parents drew down upon themselves by their wanton disobedience; we walk again as in paradise; and Nature with all her powers comes forward as she did then, in the youthful bridal age of the world, to meet the transfigured man. Is not this the very thing which proves our spirit to be a spirit, that bodily hinderances, space and time, with the confusion they breed, cannot confine it? It soars even now on the wings of yearning and devotion far above all the circles of the stars: nothing checks its flight, save that earthly power which, when sin entered, pounced upon it and enslaved it. This however we can and ought to subdue, by prayer, by self-abasement before the Lord, by confessing our vast guilt, and by boundless gratitude to him for his unfathomable love; and then we see and hear the things that are curtained from us by space and time; we are here and there; the future comes forward and, like the past, pours out its secrets before us; the whole realm of knowledge, of comprehension, lies open to us; the powers of heaven become our willing servants: and yet to the truly wise man one glimpse into the mysteries of the Godhead, one emotion of his own heart when toucht by God's love, is far higher, and far more precious knowledge, than all the treasures which do homage to the inquiring mind, than the revealed soul of history or of the present time, than the bending knees of a thousand angels who are ready to call him their master."
Alfonso cast a look of enthusiasm upon his friend; and Antonio could not refrain from acknowledging to himself that here in the garb of lowly simplicity he found more than had ever delighted him from Apone's mouth, even at the time of his greatest admiration for that ostentatious philosopher. Indeed he was already become fully convinced that the knowledge which people call supernatural may be easily united with piety and a thorough resignation to the Lord.