Marie Corelli was a British writer during the Victorian era who was the most popular writer of fiction during her time. Works like Vendetta and Temporal Power have been adapted for the stage and screen, and while she is no longer as well known as contemporaries like Kipling and H.G. Wells, her books are still widely read today.

Dark against the sky towered the Great Pyramid, and over its apex hung the moon. Like a wreck cast ashore by some titanic storm, the Sphinx, reposing amid the undulating waves of grayish sand surrounding it, seemed for once to drowse. Its solemn visage that had impassively watched ages come and go, empires rise and fall, and generations of men live and die, appeared for the moment to have lost its usual expression of speculative wisdom and intense disdain-its cold eyes seemed to droop, its stern mouth almost smiled.

The old by-road went rambling down into a dell of deep green shadow. It was a reprobate of a road, -a vagrant of the land, -having long ago wandered out of straight and even courses and taken to meandering aimlessly into many ruts and furrows under arching trees, which in wet weather poured their weight of dripping rain upon it and made it little more than a mud pool. Between straggling bushes of elder and hazel, blackberry and thorn, it made its solitary shambling way, so sunken into itself with long disuse that neither to the right nor to the left of it could anything be seen of the...

In the Gospels of the only Divine Friend this world has ever had or ever will have, we read of a Voice, a 'Voice in the Wilderness.' There have been thousands of such Voices;-most of them ineffectual. All through the world's history their echoes form a part of the universal record, and from the very beginning of time they have sounded forth their warnings or entreaties in vain. The Wilderness has never cared to hear them. The Wilderness does not care to hear them now.

I, who write this, am a dead man. Dead legally-dead by absolute proofs-dead and buried Ask for me in my native city and they will tell you I was one of the victims of the cholera that ravaged Naples in 1884, and that my mortal remains lie moldering in the funeral vault of my ancestors. Yet-I live I feel the warm blood coursing through my veins-the blood of thirty summers-the prime of early manhood invigorates me, and makes these eyes of mine keen and bright-these muscles strong as iron-this hand powerful of grip-this well-knit form erect and proud of bearing. Yes -I am alive, though...

A cloud floated slowly above the mountain peak. Vast, fleecy and white as the crested foam of a sea-wave, it sailed through the sky with a divine air of majesty, seeming almost to express a consciousness of its own grandeur. Over a spacious tract of Southern California it extended its snowy canopy, moving from the distant Pacific Ocean across the heights of the Sierra Madre, now and then catching fire at its extreme edge from the sinking sun, which burned like a red brand flung on the roof of a roughly built hut situated on the side of a sloping hollow in one of the smaller hills.

We live in an age of universal inquiry, ergo of universal scepticism. The prophecies of the poet, the dreams of the philosopher and scientist, are being daily realized-things formerly considered mere fairy-tales have become facts-yet, in spite of the marvels of learning and science that are hourly accomplished among us, the attitude of mankind is one of disbelief. "There is no God " cries one theorist; "or if there be one, I can obtain no proof of His existence "