detached as much from hope as from regret.  It was through such strict rule that I managed to live through the years behind me, he said; I felt that I must never look back, but in a moment of great physical fatigue the past returned, and it lies before me now, the sting taken out of it, like the evening sky in tranquil waters.  Even the memory that I once believed myself to be the Messiah promised to the Jews ceases to hurt; what we deem mistakes are part and parcel of some great design.  Nothing befalls but by the will of God.  My mistakes! why do I speak of them as mistakes, for like all else they were from the beginning of time, and still are and will be till the end of time, in the mind of God.  His thoughts continued to unroll, it was not long before he felt himself thinking that the world was right to defend itself against those that would repudiate it.  For the world, he said to himself, cannot be else than the world, a truth that was hidden from me in those early days.  The world does not belong to us, but to God.  It was he that made it, and it is for him to unmake it when he chooses and to remake us if he chooses.  Meanwhile we should do well to accept his decrees and to talk no more of destroying the Temple and building it up again in three days.  Nor should we trouble ourselves to reprove the keepers of the Temple for having made themselves a God according to their own image and likeness, with passions like a man and angers like a man, thereby falling into idolatry, for what else is our God but an Assyrian king who sits on a throne and metes out punishments and rewards?  It may be that the priests will some day come into the knowledge that all things are equal in God’s sight, and that he is not to be won by sacrifices, observances or prayers, that he has no need of these things, not even of our love, or it may be that they will remain priests.  But though God desires neither sacrifices, observances, nor even love, it cannot be that we are wholly divorced from God.  It may be that we are united to him by the daily tasks which he has set us to perform.

Jesus was moved to put his pipes to his lips, and the sheep returned to him and followed him into the cavern in which they were to sleep that night.

CHAP.  XXIX.

It is a great joy to return to thought after a long absence from it, and Jesus was not afraid, though once his conscience asked him if he were justified in yielding himself unreservedly to reason.  A man’s mind, he answered, like all else, is part of the Godhead; and at that moment he heard God speaking to him out of the breeze.  My beloved son, he said, we shall never be separated from each other again.  And Jesus replied:  not again, Father, for thou hast returned to me the God that I once knew in Nazareth and in the hills above Jericho, and lost sight of as soon as I began to read the Book of Daniel.  How many, he asked himself, have been led by reading that