Today's Stichomancy for Leonardo da Vinci

that will transform, not only our Markets and our Law Courts and our sense of Property, and other institutions, into something really great and glorious instead of the dismal masses of rubbish which they at present are; but it will transform our sense of Morality.

Our Morality at present consists in the idea of self-goodness --one of the most pernicious and disgusting ideas which has ever infested the human brain. If any one should follow and assimilate what I have just said about the true nature of the Self he will realize that it will never again be possible for him to congratulate himself on his own goodness or morality or

Pagan and Christian Creeds

the world, and of the sun, and of the moon, and of the stars and of the whole circle of the heavens; and never will I say or think otherwise.

SOCRATES: Shall we then agree with them of old time in maintaining this doctrine,--not merely reasserting the notions of others, without risk to ourselves,--but shall we share in the danger, and take our part of the reproach which will await us, when an ingenious individual declares that all is disorder?

PROTARCHUS: That would certainly be my wish.

SOCRATES: Then now please to consider the next stage of the argument.

PROTARCHUS: Let me hear.

SOCRATES: We see that the elements which enter into the nature of the

different persons draw near to death; and still more various the forms in which imagination clothes it. For this alternation of feeling compare the Old Testament,--Psalm vi.; Isaiah; Eccles.

12. When we think of God and of man in his relation to God; of the imperfection of our present state and yet of the progress which is observable in the history of the world and of the human mind; of the depth and power of our moral ideas which seem to partake of the very nature of God Himself; when we consider the contrast between the physical laws to which we are subject and the higher law which raises us above them and is yet a part of them; when we reflect on our capacity of becoming the 'spectators of all time and all existence,' and of framing in our own minds

steeds, and armed with lances which every ploughboy could wrest out of their hands, and use in his own behalf.

The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For those suits of armour had once held living men; strong, brave, wise; men of an admirable temper; doing their work according to their light, not altogether well--what man does that on earth?--but well enough to make themselves necessary to, and loyally followed by, the masses whom they ruled. No one can read fairly the "Gesta Dei per Francos in Oriente," or the deeds of the French Nobility in their wars with England, or those tales--however legendary--of the mediaeval knights, which form so noble an element in German literature,