quiet graveyard, the priest and the hearers, all in their graves; the calm river winding under the grassy hill, on which stood the ruins of the abbey; and considered it might almost provoke speech from the dead to see how the present generation toy with questions once held to be of life and death, and to concern not merely the welfare of England, but the whole happiness of eternity.

But they were now within the church. For the first moment he could see nothing distinctly, the change from the clear frosty light of day to the gloom that obtained inside the beautiful building was so great.

Stained-glass windows darkened the face even of noon; the nave was so long that, though many candles burnt upon the altar, they seemed but as little twinkling points of brightness in the far distance. Under the then vicar gas was not permitted inside the building; lamps burned with a softened and mysterious light, giving to the interior an effect which at first sight was wonderfully impressive. The silent worshippers, almost all kneeling; the light arches and slender pillars and delicate tracery of the stonework, all suggested to the eye rather than garishly revealed; the figures of the acolytes flitting about the chancel; the mingled smell of incense and the fragrance of flowers; the vessels of gold and silver gleaming on the altar; the glittering crucifix; the rich embroidery, hung wherever draperies could be employed,-affected Sir John curiously, touched him as a great pageant sways the hearts of the masses.

With gliding noiseless footsteps the verger preceded them up the aisle. He knew Lady Moffat by sight, and although theoretically all assembled inside those walls

were considered equal, practically those who were best off in the outer world found themselves most carefully considered within the church; for which reason this attendant spirit took the newcomers up to one of the higher places, where, gravely motioning the lady to the right and the gentleman to the left, he retraced his quiet way to the door.

If he had not been well instructed before concerning this matter of etiquette, Sir John might have felt puzzled; but recollecting the arrangement Miss Banks mentioned, he took his place on the male side of the aisle, whilst Lady Moffat for a moment seemed to become merged amongst a mass of silks and laces and flowers and feathers on the other.

He bowed his head and prayed earnestly; she knelt and thought how much nicer a good roomy family pew would be than those nasty narrow little benches, where she was squeezed between two dowagers, and knew her velvet dress was being crushed and ruined. She had put it on new that morning, and knew it would never look so well again.

A soft strain of music, a sound of distant harmony coming nearer and nearer. The congregation arose with one accord, making a noise in simultaneously doing so like a ship cutting her way through water or a great bird passing swiftly through the air.

Sir John stood up with the rest. He did not in the least comprehend what was coming, but he considered it right and civil to conform to the manners and customs of those around him.

The tones of the organ (unseen) waxed louder, the notes of the chant became clearer. Sir John felt as if he were dreaming; the dim light, the illuminated altar, the deft young acolytes, touching

one candle and then another, till all set about the chancel leaped suddenly into flame; a door he had not before perceived opening by no visible agency, and revealing, as in a side scene, a procession of choristers, slowly advancing and singing as they came on.

It seemed to the unaccustomed eyes of the man who gazed that the procession was endless; on and on and on-first very small boys, then those of a larger growth, then youths taller still, then young men, then great portly fellows, then ascetic-looking priests. The choir-boys and men, children and adults, were all clad in white. A flock of doves could not have looked purer as they passed in their snowy garments up the chancel, each bowing to the altar, each subsiding into his place and drooping his head amongst billows of drapery.

The priests were arrayed differently; according to their degree, they wore garments varying from the plainest to the richest. Wonderful were the adornments of one who knelt before the altar, with his back to the congregation. Marvellous did it seem to one accustomed to a simpler ritual to see men decked out with lace, to watch the loose and awkward stride of those who crossed the chancel, cumbered with unwonted skirts. But not one-half so strange did the splendour of the robes appear to Sir John as the genuflexions, which seemed to his different faith as meaningless as the prostration of a Hindoo to Vishnu.

The service began. He did not perceive much of the after-playcrossing, bowing, bending; these things passed him by, because, with eyes lowered, with face covered, he prayed where another might have looked on. He had not come to criticise; he had not

come to hear the music or to look upon a show. The way of worshipping the Almighty within those walls truly was not his way, but if some storm-tossed souls were able to find safe anchorage in those unlikely waters, what was he that he should smile because others were different from himself?

There had been a time when the old Covenanter blood which flowed in his veins would have risen in hot rebellion at such Popish practices, when many a text would have recurred to memory denouncing idolatry and all idolatrous practices. But he had so long been driving before the winds and the waves, that he felt powerless to criticise, impotent to condemn. He could not thank God he was not as others; the one passionate cry that he uttered to Heaven was, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'

Sometimes he caught himself wondering how it was with many a one there. Under the purple and fine linen were there weary hearts throbbing? Not known of men, were there tired souls repentant of sin, remorseful for error; unseen save by God what cancers were consuming their vitality! Never to be told here, what sorrows and tragedies, what griefs and struggles, what troubles and disappointments, lay hidden away under silk and velvet, and the external signs of wealth and the worldly semblance of complete prosperity!

Why, even under the embroidered robes and the priestly functions a worm might be gnawing; sorrow tearing the quivering flesh. As he sat, he thought of Eli ministering before the Lord, his mind disturbed, his heart broken by the iniquity of his sons; and he marvelled whether amongst those within the chancel there

might not be one whose soul was even then crying to God in his agony. Unconsciously, perhaps, but still surely, his own sin; his own misery, his own repentance had drawn him nearer and nearer, closer and closer to the Maker he had offended; and as he attained to that knowledge which is perfected alone through suffering, he grew better to understand his fellow-men, and to comprehend more thoroughly their need, their silence, their suffering, their aspirations, their petitions, and the comfort and the strength the Almighty gives as surely and as wonderfully as daily bread.

Though Sir John was in many respects a weak, he was not an impressionable, man. Music did not touch him much, he had never stood before a painting rapt and forgetful; it was only through suffering, as has been before said, he learned to love Nature. As a great crime makes for the moment an otherwise commonplace individual notorious, so a grievous sin removed Sir John Moffat from the atmosphere of ordinary conventionality in which otherwise he must have moved and had his being.

Error had made him charitable and pitiful to error, sorrow had quickened his perception of human sorrow, remorse had taught him to understand the devious ways, the thousand circuitous routes of the worm that eats all the happiness out of life; trouble had made him thoughtful; guilt, religious-religious in a wide comprehensive

sense.

Can man know good till he has eaten of evil? can he understand the bitterness of the fruit till he has tasted its sweetness? Ah, friends, I think not, and I believe no man may estimate the truth of the Bible till out of the fulness of his own experience he can declare,

'I know that from thorns a man may not gather grapes, nor from thistles, figs.'

Sir John could have told this much, at any rate. He knew just what sin could do for any man, just the grain tares were certain to produce. He had done well, as the world counts success; all men thought him fortunate; he was envied, respected. Ah, look at that worn face, at that head all sprinkled with gray, at those nervously clasped hands, at that humble abandonment of attitude which God knew was only an outward and visible sign of the contrite and broken heart within, and say, was the fruit he gathered goodly or the reverse? the grain into which he thrust his sickle one any man should desire to harvest?

The Litany was omitted, or rather it never at St. Theresa's formed a portion of the forenoon service; this stranger missed it. He had learned to love that fervent outpouring of the heart, though at first it had seemed to him strange and methodical. It is the one portion of the Church formula which grows upon the hearts of Dissenters and which recommends itself to their minds and feelings, no matter how much the balder faith they may have walked in from childhood rebels against the other forms and ceremonies of the religion as by law established.

Singing-it seemed to Sir John the service was nothing but singing-all music, gesture, mumble; he could scarce hear the words of the lessons, epistle, gospel; the prayers, save that he knew what they were by heart, must have been to him as Greek.

More singing; this time a sad plaintive hymn, with an intelligible air; and while it was in progress a figure he knew walked slowly down the chancel, and, ascending the pulpit-stairs, knelt.

No nonsense about that man's movements, no awkward stride, no ill-learnt lesson, no seeming consciousness of the eyes fastened upon him. No millinery about his person; nothing save the plain white surplice and scarlet hood: his own dark hair, his own pale face supplied all the rest.

He knelt-Sir John's gaze followed him-he rose and stood still while the choristers finished, then he said, as was the custom at that church, In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but he did not cross himself. He stood quite erect, he looked down the long aisles, and he said,

'And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. In the twelfth chapter of second Samuel, and the seventh verse, it is so written, THOU ART THE MAN.'

Could he have chosen no other text? was not Holy Writ long enough and wide enough for him to have selected any verse save that?

For one swift instant Sir John's eyes never left the preacher; then they turned involuntarily across the aisle. Lady Moffat was settling herself into her place, smoothing out the folds of her velvet dress, the peach-like softness he so well remembered on her still fair face, the special beauty of her profile brought out by the subdued light of a window near to where she sat.

'THOU ART THE MAN,' repeated the preacher; and as David slung a stone into the brazen forehead of his Philistine foe, so he dropped that statement deep down into the heart of one of his hearers.

'The practice of reading the Scriptures piecemeal, so prevalent amongst those who read the Scriptures at all,' began Mr. Woodham, 'has this great disadvantage, that a general knowledge of the characters mentioned and a clear comprehension of the incidents re

corded are thereby rendered impossible.

"Suppose that any one tried to read a novel as many persons think they can peruse the Bible— a chapter here, a verse there, with long intervals of time moreover between these desultory studiesis it likely that he could ever arrive at a true idea of the story, or of the nature of the men and women whose actions are told in its pages?

A paragraph on one page, a few sentences in another, a striking scene perhaps at the end of a volume, or a dramatic position which happens to strike the fancy,

how could any just idea of an author's meaning and intention be derived from such a course of procedure?

'And yet this is how many even very religious people treat the Bible-indeed, so far as my own experience and observation goes, I might say it is how most people treat it and the consequence is they utterly fail to grasp its meaning, whether as a complete history of a given period of time, or as a series of narratives of the men who lived during that period, and left their mark for good or for evil upon that history.

It is not likely that a single person now present is unacquainted with the incidents in the chapter from which my text is taken; the poor man's ewe-lamb, the rich man's haughty greed, the king's swift sympathy with the wronged, the crushing rejoinder of Nathan, the terrible statement, "The sword shall never depart from thine house"—the fiat, "The child also that is born unto thee shall surely die;" the sickness of the child; David's anguish, his tears, his fastings, his prayers, his final resignation; these things, I say, are all familiar in your ears as a tale oft told; but

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that which is not familiar is a comprehension of the man to whom Nathan came, he who was raised upon high, the anointed of the Lord, the sweet psalmist of Israel. It is, first, this insight into that strange and complex nature I wish to give you; and second, I desire to speak of the sin for which so terrible a punishment was decreed. It were idle to say such matters are not to be mentioned in the pulpit when we know they are talked of in every home, not with bated breath and the horror they merit and the human pity they should evoke, but as dishes of scandal eagerly served and greedily swallowed; tid-bits of gossip to be carried from house to house, to be canvassed and gloated over, as though the sin and the sorrow, the suffering, the remorse, the ruin were as grateful to the minds of Christians in the nineteenth century as the struggles of men and wild beasts in the arena were pleasant to the nobles and matrons of imperial Rome.'

There was a rustle in the building, a swish amongst the women, as when a breeze disturbs the fallen leaves; a stir through the men, as though they were rousing themselves to a keener attention.

Not a man or a woman present but knew perfectly well the idea which suggested this theme to the preacher. A great scandal had arisen-one of those terrible stories of domestic shipwreck that periodically delight modern society, and increase the sale of newspapers, seem very shocking to honest-minded folks, and very piquant and amusing to cads of high and low degree.

The principals in the drama. were people well known to many in the congregation, and those who did not happen to be personally acquainted with them were

intimate with friends of the respective families. Mr. Woodham, it was well understood, strongly disapproved of the morbid interest taken in the affair. He had not hesitated to express censure in quarters where such censure was unusual and likely to give offence; in no faltering terms was his voice raised in reprobation of the sparrow-like chattering there had been over this delicious grain of scandal. He had denounced the gloating over each fresh detail of shame and sorrow in language society is not much accustomed to hear nowadays, which, so said his suave vicar, might have befitted the times of Wesley or Luther, but could scarcely, with advantage, be reproduced in the midst of a highly educated and refined age. It was said he had taken his hat, and straightway walked out of a drawing-room, when a fashionable lady persisted in asking his opinions concerning the 'sad affair; and he had not scrupled to style the court over which Sir James Hannen presides a disgrace to the community, and to add it was only because of the hardness of men's hearts divorce could be considered permissible at all.

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It was therefore conceived by most of his hearers that he now meant to vindicate the position he had taken up, and make David's transgression a peg upon which to hang matters more personal to himself; but such was far from his intention. The late scandal had indeed suggested to him the idea of speaking some very plain truths to a congregation over-fond of having their ears tickled and their foibles humoured. But when he came to devote his whole mind to the narrative, he had found the touching brevity of that dark wrong committed so