My father, furious as he was at finding himself dragged into complicity with this man’s imposture, could not resist a smile at the effrontery with which he lowered his tone here, and appeared unwilling to dwell on an incident which he could not recall without being affected almost to tears, and mere allusion to which, had involved an apparent self-display that was above all things repugnant to him.  What a difference between the Hanky of Thursday evening with its “never set eyes on him and hope I never shall,” and the Hanky of Sunday morning, who now looked as modest as Cleopatra might have done had she been standing godmother to a little blue-eyed girl—­Bellerophon’s first-born baby.

Having recovered from his natural, but promptly repressed, emotion, the Professor continued:-

“I need not remind you of the purpose for which so many of us, from so many parts of our kingdom, are here assembled.  We know what we have come hither to do:  we are come each one of us to sign and seal by his presence the bond of his assent to those momentous changes, which have found their first great material expression in the temple that you see around you.

“You all know how, in accordance with the expressed will of the Sunchild, the Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the Musical Banks began as soon as he had left us to examine, patiently, carefully, earnestly, and without bias of any kind, firstly the evidences in support of the Sunchild’s claim to be the son of the tutelar deity of this world, and secondly the precise nature of his instructions as regards the future position and authority of the Musical Banks.

“My friends, it is easy to understand why the Sunchild should have given us these instructions.  With that foresight which is the special characteristic of divine, as compared with human, wisdom, he desired that the evidences in support of his superhuman character should be collected, sifted, and placed on record, before anything was either lost through the death of those who could alone substantiate it, or unduly supplied through the enthusiasm of over-zealous visionaries.  The greater any true miracle has been, the more certainly will false ones accrete round it; here, then, we find the explanation of the command the Sunchild gave to us to gather, verify, and record, the facts of his sojourn here in Erewhon.  For above all things he held it necessary to ensure that there should be neither mistake, nor even possibility of mistake.

“Consider for a moment what differences of opinion would infallibly have arisen, if the evidences for the miraculous character of the Sunchild’s mission had been conflicting—­if they had rested on versions each claiming to be equally authoritative, but each hopelessly irreconcilable on vital points with every single other.  What would future generations have said in answer to those who bade them fling all human experience to the winds, on the strength of records written they knew not certainly by whom, nor how long after the marvels that they recorded, and of which all that could be certainly said was that no two of them told the same story?