Note (14) — Chapter XVI

“Her glowing features, as she turned them toward him, with an expression half impatient, half pleading, were indeed those “(14)of a stilled infant smiling through its tears.” Perhaps, too, another cause might have operated on this prophet of curses, and made him utter a blessing where he meant malediction; but into this we dare not inquire, nor will it ever be fully known till the day when all secrets must be disclosed. However it was, he felt himself compelled to tell her it was a new religion, the religion of Christ, whose rites and worshippers she beheld. “But what are the rites?” asked Immalee. “Do they murder their children, or their parents, to prove their love to God? Do they hang them on baskets to perish, or leave them on the banks of rivers to be devoured by fierce and hideous animals?”—“The religion they profess forbids that,” said the stranger, with reluctant truth; “it requires them to honour their parents, and to cherish their children.”—“But why do they not spurn from the entrance to their church those who do not think as they do?”—“Because their religion enjoins them to be mild, benevolent, and tolerant; and neither to reject or disdain those who have not attained its purer light.”—“But why is there no splendour or magnificence in their worship; nothing grand or attractive?”—“Because they know that God cannot be acceptably worshipped but by pure hearts and crimeless hands; and though their religion gives every hope to the penitent guilty, it flatters none with false promises of external devotion supplying the homage of the heart; or artificial and picturesque religion standing in the place of that single devotion to God, before whose throne, though the proudest temples erected to his honour crumble into dust, the heart burns on the altar still, an inextinguishable and acceptable victim.”