"I do think it a demonstration indeed," said Augustus, musing gravely.
"How strangely must that stupendous Being," said Strabo, the geographer, "deem of a world which has come so completely to forget and ignore him!"
"Your reasoning," resumed Augustus, "differs much, as you said it would, from Plato's. Plato is too subtle for our Roman taste."
"So is he," said Dionysius, "too subtle, and, I think, too hesitating, for the taste of most men everywhere. I admire his genius, but I disclaim many of his theories, and am not a disciple of his school."
"Of what school are you?"
"I am dissatisfied with every school," replied the future convert of St. Paul, blushing. "But I am quite certain that there is only one God, and that he is eternal and all-perfect.
"What I have said, I have said because I believe it; not in order to play at mental swords with these eloquent and gifted men, whom I honor. There is, if we would look for it, a reflection of this great Being in our minds like that of a star in water; but the water must be undisturbed, or the light wavers and is broken. We see many beings, greater and smaller. Now, who can doubt that, where there are greater and smaller, there must be a greatest? Each one of us is conscious and certain of three things: first, that he himself has not existed from all eternity; secondly, each of us feels that he did not make his own mind; and thirdly, that he could not make another mind. Now, the mind who made ours must be superior to any thing contained in what he thus made; therefore, although we can conceive a being of whose power, knowledge, and perfection we discern no possible limit, this very conception must be inferior to its object. There must exist outside of our mind some being greater still than the greatest of which we can form any intellectual idea, however boundless. The lead fused in a mould cannot be greater in its outlines than the mould which presents the form. Again, no person will contend that the sublime and the absurd are one and the same thing—that the terms are convertible. But yet, if an absolutely perfect and sovereign being did not exist, the conception which we form of such a being, instead of constituting the highest heaven of sublimity to which our thoughts can soar, would constitute the lowest depth of absurdity into which they could sink."
A little pause followed.
"Do you, then," said Afer, with a subtle smile, "introduce to us the novel doctrine, that whatever is sublime must therefore be true?"
"If I said yes," replied Dionysius, "and I am not a little tempted, you would succeed in drawing me aside into a very long and darkling road. But I have advanced nothing to that effect. My inference depended not on assuming that every thing which is sublime must be true, but on the supposition that nothing which is absurd could be sublime."