“And therefore, my dear uncle, you will, I hope, justify my scepticism in all such matters,” said he archly.  I acknowledge, as Socrates says, that I felt for a moment as if I had received a sudden blow, and hardly knew what to say.  “No,” said I at last, “unless you can justify Dr. Strauss’s theory of historical criticism, of which you yourself acknowledge you have doubts.  With that any thing may be proved false; meantime it appears that the facts to which it is applied may be undoubtedly true.”

____

On retiring to my chamber, I mused for some time on the facility with which man’s ingenuity or inclinations can pervert any facts which he resolves shall be otherwise than they are.  “Dubious as is the evidence,” Harrington was fond of saying, “I distrust the Judas still more”; an admission, I told him, of which I should one day remind him.  Tired at last of this unpleasant theme, I took up a volume of Leibnitz’s Theodicee, which happened to lie on the table, and read those striking passages towards the conclusion in which he represents Theodore (reluctant to accept the iron theory of necessity) as privileged with a peep into a number of the infinite possible worlds; from which he has the satisfaction of seeing that, bad as is the lot of Sextus in the best of all possible worlds, that lot, Sextus being what he is, could not possibly be any better; a queer consolation, by the way, till we know why Sextus must be what he is, or why Sextus must be at all.

I sank off to slumber in my chair, no doubt under the soporific effects of this metaphysical morphine.  While I slept, the previous discussions of the day and the dose of Theodicee operating together suggested a very strange dream, which I shall here record.  It shall be entitled

The paradise of fools.

Methought I saw a grave and very venerable old man with a long white beard enter my chamber, and quietly seat himself opposite to me.  Instead of asking who he was and how he came there, nothing seemed more natural and proper.  We all know how easily in dreams the mind dispenses with all ceremony; little or no introduction is required; every one is at once on a most delightful footing of familiarity with all the world; and the greatest possible incongruities appear just comme il faut.

He told me that he had come from a very curious part of the “best of all possible worlds,”—­the “Paradise of Fools”; and on my looking surprised, said,—­

“Are you ignorant, then, that there is a spot in the universe where a vicegerent of the Deity has at his disposal unlimited power and wisdom to enable him to comply with the somewhat whimsical conditions of the theories of those wonderful philosophers who have taken upon them to say how the universe might have been constructed without any supreme or presiding intelligence at all; or have modestly suggested, that, had they been consulted, certain notable improvements might have been effected in its fabrication or government; or, lastly, who have complained of the revelation which God has vouchsafed to man, or contended, that, if true, it might have been more unexceptionably framed, and more skilfully promulgated?”