passed across this globe affirming that God answers prayer, that Christ has visited their hearts, and that they are assured of a life beyond the grave are we to believe that this great and glorious host was but a phantom army, following a Chimæra, deluded and deluding? Surely it would be well for modern scepticism to abandon this colossal arrogance out of mere modesty, to become, if it is possible, "as unassuming as Socrates," and to bring itself to that condition of realism wherein one is able to perceive that the soul of St. Paul, the heart of Shakespeare, and the mind of Milton are as greatly and as truly facts of existence as atoms in metals, corpuscles in blood, and fossils in rocks.

For nearly two thousand years men and women of high intelligence and great range of feeling have professed their conviction that God answers prayer and that Christ confers blessing. They have persisted in these affirmations against the obstruction of the world, in the face of disaster, and amidst the derision of scepticism. And from the lives of these men and women have come the highest ideals and purest poetry of human existence.

Here in our own day we have a witness to this ancient faith. A woman marked out by destiny for a terrible destruction, becomes through the love and tenderness of a Christ-minded friend, healed of an incurable affliction, transformed

from misery and dejection to happiness and ecstasy, and gives herself with an ever-increasing satisfaction of soul to the work of this same Christ, so improbable and unreal to the dark mind of infidelity. Suppose that she, too, had embraced the agnosticism of materialism-what must have been her fate? And do not the nobility of her life, the luminous brightness of her soul, and the fervent gratitude of her heart, convince us even more than the miracle of her healing that she is following no ghost and worshipping no Phantasm? Is joy the child of hysteria, and nothingness the cause of peace?

She has given me a book of Whittier's poems, and her pen has traced lines of emphasis under certain of the verses which express her aspiration and her view of the Christian life. Consider the purity and peace of a soul which after such a tempest as she has known can settle itself in these words and live them in her life:

"If there be some weaker one,

Give me strength to help him on;
If a blinder soul there be,

Let me guide him nearer Thee.

Clothe with life the weak intent,
Let me be the thing I meant."

I would it were in my power to breathe into these pages the sweet mirth and happy brightness of this soul which was once plunged deep

into the abyss of dejection. I wish that I could give to these last words something of the spell and fragrance of her character, something of that blithe and buoyant gladness, which shines in her eyes, sounds in her voice, and communicates itself in all the thousand kindnesses which make her busy life. For it is the happiness of her soul which seems to me the most compelling proof of the miracle. She is so cheerful, even so merry; so gracious and pleasant; so delighted by the simplest happiness of others, so devoted to children, and so happy in their mirth-that one is tempted to doubt, not the miracle, but the madness and the melancholy which once all but destroyed her. Is it not a beautiful thought that this woman is especially loved by children, and that her influence for good in the East is chiefly among young girls who learn from her the story of Christ and who adore her as a mother? Those who are acquainted with children will know that their affection is seldom given to the wicked and never to the melancholy.

"almost

"I feel sometimes," she told me, overwhelmed by my consciousness of God's blessing. That He should have saved me is mercy enough, and that He should have given me work to do for Him is blessing enough; but that He should have given me the love of children, and placed it in my hands to prepare these children for His Kingdom-this overwhelms me.

You

can understand how deeply I love my Saviour, and how it is, when I am quite alone after the day's work, I often find my eyes full of tears and my heart almost breaking with gratitude."

Among the marked verses in the book which she has given me I find:

"To Him, from wandering long and wild,
I come, an over-wearied child,

In cool and shade His peace to find
Like dew-fall settling on my mind."

BETRAYED

S pretty and pleasing a little girl as ever began life without adequate knowledge of

the world passed one day from the shelter of an English orphanage for the children of soldiers into the very dangerous and difficult experience of domestic service.

She gave every promise of growing into a pure and happy womanhood. She was by nature bright and intelligent; by training, industrious and orderly. There was nothing at all in her appearance, nothing at all in her mind, to suggest the brazen face and the bold nature of a public woman. It would have shocked even a man of the world to think for a moment that this so virtuous and so innocent-looking girl-this girl whose candour, honesty, and respectability showed not only in the neatness of her dress and in the general note of her appearance, but in the clear goodness of her eyes and the modest manner of her speaking-could ever see moral corruption, could ever descend to the sink of iniquity, could ever illustrate the pain of Shakespeare for "maiden virtue rudely strumpeted."