"'Behold the eyes of yonder gambler; his soul is asphyxied with gold. He pays that homage to the base gleam of a metal that I do to the light of the stars. He is an idolater.'
"In the centre of the city a terrible fear troubled my soul, for it realised that it alone in all this great city of souls preserved its conscience and its wakefulness. By the glare of men's eyes it understood how all were somnambulists. We walked among millions who walked in their sleep. And in their sleep they committed terrible crimes. They looked at me with eyes that saw not; at the bidding of strange dreams they went forward secretly.
"I beheld the thousand mockeries, and chief among them the mockery of our eternal mystery. Instead of the church that is the dome of heaven itself they had built churches of stone. And the people, urged by their dreams, congregated themselves in these churches and were ministered unto by false priests. And dreams of truth conflicted with nightmare enacted themselves. The churches fell out among themselves, and the people fought one another. False priests stood by irresolute, their soft, shapeless lips having been smoothed away by maxims and old words. And they stood in front of idols in a semblance of defence.
"I pushed many priests aside; I thrust my sword through many idols.
"'Come,' I said, 'your town is terrible. Let me away into my mountain again. You wish me to consider this world worthy of me; you offer me its small things in exchange for my great thing. You have not even small things to offer. Farewell!'
"'And what is your doctrine?' he said to me at parting. As if we had a doctrine!
"'For you,' I said, 'the worship of the explained; for us the remembrance of the inexplicable.'"
V. HIS CONVERSION
"'But your religion?' said the townsman. 'You spoke of your religion.
What do you mean by religion?'
"'Religion is to have charity: never to condemn, never to despair, never to believe that the finite can ever quite cover up the infinite, never to believe that anything is wholly explained, to see the inexplicable in all things, and to remember that words are idols and judgments are blasphemies. For words are the naming of things that are without name, and judgments are the limiting of the wonder of God. And what we call God is the inexplicable, the indefinable, the great Unknown to whom in the midst of the idolatry of Athens an altar was once erected.'