some

he disappeared again veiled in flying scud. A few minutes later thing like a cluster of feathers rose to view upon the far horizon, and Cranton said hoarsely: "That must be some of the tall palms beyond Lahu. I've been on the Ivory Coast before."

Higher and higher grew the distant objects, until at last it appeared as if the trees sprang aloft from the midst of the sea. Then a shadowy background of low-lying forest rose to view, and one of the Krooboys crawled aft, clinging for his life to the rail as a sea burst across the vessel, and shouted excitedly: "I know him, sah, know him bad; be Lahu Lagoon, sah."

66 Take your chance and let him run her in; the Krooboys know every inch of the coast," said Cranton, and while the Captain nodded his head, the helmsman whirling round the spokes, swung the Corona's bows towards the palms.

"It's our only chance; go down and tell Jim to hold out, and drive her all he can. It's a race now to get in before we founder," said the Captain, and Cranton, dodging a sea, dived into the engine-room, and safely reached the submerged floorplates. The engineer splashed about among the rising water, while the drowned cranks hammered and gurgled amid a seething mass of foam.

"She's going all she's worth; come and see," he said, and together they waded into the stokehold. A roaring blast swept down the yawning ventilator shafts and rushed towards the trembling boiler front, where, stripped to the waist, two haggard firemen, streaming with perspiration, balanced themselves against the rolling as they forced the twinkling fires. Every now and then, as the tug lurched forward, a gurgling wave surged hissing among the red ashes

The most comforting thing, Cranton thought, was the ringing clang of the big pump and the hissing of the injection, and he knew that every throbbing cylinder and palpitating valve was doing its utmost in that wild race for life.

When he reached the bridge again, the Krooboy was pointing excitedly ahead and shouting: "Keep them tall palm open, sah, one lil' hand, plenty too much surf, sah." The coast-line now lay clear and bright in the watery sunshine, a strip of yellow beach, alternately visible and hidden by clouds of spray as the milelong ridges of water burst upon it; beyond was a fringe of feathery palms, and behind these again what appeared to be a waste of mangroves.

"I can see no entrance, and if we go ashore the surf will smash every bone in our bodies. Steady helm !" said the Captain. Cranton glanced aft with his heart in his mouth at the ocean-walls that chased them astern or burst with a roar over the counter, while the whole vessel trembled with the shaking of her racing engines as she swung high on the crest. Then a shout from the Krooboy made him turn his eyes, and dragging out his glasses, he fancied he could see a smooth green riband of water winding through the chaos of foam ahead. The Corona stormed through it towards the deadly sand, all hands clinging to the rail wherever they could find a lee, gazing in half breathless silence at the yeasty confusion before

them. At last the beach lay close at hand, and the air was filled with the roar of the surf, as every now and then a dark line of water rose up and blotted out forest and shore until it crumbled away into cascades of white upon the sand.

""Tarboard now, sah," said the Krooboy, and the helmsman glanced at the Captain with wonder in his face, for a starboard helm would cant them towards the worst of the surf. The Captain clenched his teeth and nodded his head, and the steamer's bows swung right inshore. Cranton felt his skin creep and his nerves tingle, and strove to choke down a wild desire to wrench the wheel out of the seaman's hands, and turn the vessel's bows anywhere but towards that white death ahead; but the negro clung to the binnacle, silent and rigid, like an ebony statue. Then he shouted, Port now, port one time," and the watchers held their breath as they saw a sharply marked strip of rolling green water open between the mad smother on either side. The Captain threw himself upon the wheel, and aided by the helmsman spun the spokes round for dear life, and the bows pointed straight towards the narrow way where was salvation.

Then a harsh voice shouted "Hold on all," and a vast roller rose up astern as high as the flame-tipped funnel ring. Every eye was turned aft, for if that sea curled and broke too soon, all hands would be ground to pieces on the sand below. As they gazed, there was a roar and a rush, the Corona was caught up and swept madly forward on the foaming crest. Captain and helmsman clung to the spokes with a grip of steel, until the mass broke up and melted away, then,

sinking through the whirling backwash, the tug steamed safely into the smooth water across the bar.

Ten minutes later the engines were stopped and the Captain gasped out, "Thank God!" as the anchors plunged into the lagoon, and the little vessel swung smoothly up and down on the swell which worked in across the bar. Now that the decks were no longer swept the pumps could cope with the water, and in a few hours the holds were free.

There is little more to tell. The wind dropped and the sea went down, as suddenly as it generally does on that coast, and the Corona lay for a week, leisurely repairing damages, in a fairly healthy, sand-girded lagoon. Then it chanced that a little topheavy patrol gunboat came rolling by, and in answer to a signal sent in a boat. When they learned the state of affairs, her officers stripped themselves of whatever comforts they had for the benefit of the fever-stricken crew, the surgeon provided advice and a goodly store of drugs, and the Commander lent them black firemen and deck-hands, to be landed at Sierra Leone. Then, after her crew had thanked the kindly officers fervently, the tug steamed out across the rolling bar, coaled at Sierra Leone, made a good passage up the Trades, and in due time reached home in safety, the sick recovering on the

It used to be thought that what is known as the religious novel was a peculiar growth of British soil. M. Jules Lemâitre in one of his essays points out, as a strange idiosyncrasy of us islanders, that we are in the habit of mixing up our story-telling with the discussion of all sorts of moral and spiritual problems. In his own happy land if people want a work of edification they buy it separately, and do not expect to find it amalgamated with a work of fiction. But even in France the religious question has become too urgent to be ruled out of any department of literature. M. Zola's LOURDES and ROME, M. Huysmans's EN ROUTE, and the charming tales of M. Yves de Querdec, to name no others, are striking cases in point among contemporary fiction.

No more telling illustration of the strength of the prevailing current of thought could be given than the fact that the Apostle of Naturalism should have devoted two very thick volumes to the examination of certain phases of Catholic life. It is not necessary to say very much about LOURDES except in so far as it elucidates its successor. It illustrates M. Zola's familiar advantages and defects as a writer; his easy use of accumulated details so as to produce the desired impression; his power of giving a symbolic meaning to some central feature of his story and leaving the reader at last with one strange and grandiose image stamped on his mind, summing up for him the whole spirit of the book. Such, for instance, is the hospital train, bearing its load of

His

misery to the place of miracles; this grotesque entity, made up of hundreds of souls in pain breathing out their desperate desire in the Latin hymns of the Church, while the peasants in the fields look up and listen and wonder as the train speeds by. And on the other hand, one is forced once more to recognise the curious limitations of his powerful mind. characters have no development: each is represented, as in the old ballads, by a single gesture or phrase; M. de Guersaint always amiably volatile, like an innocent elderly sparrow; Sister Hyacinthe always gay and ready for duty in a clean apron and cuffs; Marie always innocent and emotional, with her golden hair. Then we note his tremendous assumptions, comical in the case of one who glows with righteous indignation at the bare thought of the assumptions of faith; his absolute blindness to certain generally admitted canons of conduct; the hatred of the ascetic principle or what he considers such, that is responsible for such impossible touches as that of his hero Froment's utterance to the woman who confesses to him that her visit to Lourdes as a helper in a great work of charity is merely the cloak for a guilty intrigue, a three days' carnival of the flesh, "Madam, I pity and respect you.”

In this young abbé M. Zola has sought to represent the conflict between the Church and reason. His father is a man of science, his mother a fair saint. A disappointment in love reinforces his inherited instinct of devotion by sending him into the Church; but hardly has he

donned the cassock, than his father's spirit awakes in him, and of course wins an easy victory over the vague emotional mysticism which is M. Zola's only idea of religion. M. Zola conceives of all forms of belief as the expression of man's need only. The testimony to a response from without the man to the need of his spirit he never seems for an instant to consider, dismissing all the phenomena of conversion and renewal of character under spiritual influence as so many instances of hallucination, or at most the reflex action on the soul of its own desire.

It would be useless to expect from M. Zola any new light on the phenomena of the life of faith; but he is both amusing and instructive when he comes to describe the politics of the faithful. He has a true sympathy and devotion for little Bernadette; the exquisite soul, whose dream of the wonder-working virgin created the whole movement of the Lourdes pilgrimages, and who was sent away to die, shut out as far as possible from all participation in the triumph of her work, though indeed she would never have cared for, or even understood, the lines on which the Fathers of the Grotto were shaping the work that she had begun. He leaves a vivid impression of the contrast between the ardent faith and hope of the helpers of the poor, of this great wail of human misery beating at the Virgin's shrine in an agony of supplication, and the commercial spirit that desecrates the place, the commerce of relics, the keen competition between the clerical organisers and the lay community, with their shops and hotels; the passion and the pity, the meanness and the bathos of it all. Pierre Froment is left at the end of the book entirely dominated by his parental instincts, ready to cast his breviary to the moles and

the bats. He re-appears in ROME as a Neo-Christian socialist, a fervent worker among the poor of Paris,

convinced that the mission of the Church is to set herself at the head of a great social movement for the benefit of the masses. Encouraged by such work as the Marquis de Munn's in France, by Cardinal Manning's attitude in the dockers' strike, and by Cardinal Gibbon's sanction of the movement of the Knights of Labour, he writes a book, indicating what he conceives to be the part of the Church in the reorganisation of society, and finds to his great surprise that while he supposes himself to have been writing in the interests of religion, he and his book have been denounced at Rome. The situation is obviously studied from the episode of Lamennais and the Avenir; but the extreme simplicity which M. Zola attributes to his hero in this stage hardly harmonises with the picture of his disillusioned state at the close of the volume on Lourdes. How he arrives at Rome in the pious conviction that an accused priest who comes to defend himself finds all the doors opening before him of themselves," and how he finds himself from the outset entangled in a mysterious web of intrigue, is pictured with all the impressiveness that comes of M. Zola's mastery of cumulative detail.

The matter, which had seemed so simple in Paris, of gaining an audience of the Pope and defending himself to the Head of the Church directly, appears now as a thing only to be attained by infinite diplomacy. Thus the influential Cardinal Nani enlarges on the necessity of extreme prudence. "He ventured to say that it would be wise to distrust the immediate personal surroundings of the Pope. Alas, His Holiness was SO good, was so prone to think well of every one, that his confidential servants

were not always chosen with the necessary care. You never knew to whom to appeal, nor into what snare you might not walk unawares. He even indicated that it would never do to appeal directly to His Eminence the Secretary of State, because he was involved in, and paralysed by, a perfect network of intrigue. And as the Cardinal spoke thus, very gently and with perfect unction, the Vatican seemed like a place guarded by treacherous and jealous dragons, a place where you dared not enter a door, risk a step, hazard a limb, without being quite certain beforehand as to whether you would not leave your corpse there." So by degrees in the antique city, sleeping its age-long sleep, dreaming its dream of eternity, the passionate young priest finds himself cheated with receding hopes, baulked, in a way that is dark to him, of his honest desire to explain himself face to face with the spiritual Father of Christendom. Long before his audience with the Pope approaches the sphere of the practicable he has fallen a victim to the subtle discouragement of his surroundings; he finds how helpless he is with his simple faith and his child-like imaginings in a net-work of international complications.

More than this, as he grows familiar with the city, and follows out the habits formed in Paris in works of charity and pity to the miserable victims of ruinous speculation, he realises the isolation from the poor and humble of the splendid ecclesiastical corporation that calls itself the hierarchy of Rome. His dream of the Galilean, the Gentle Jesus of the miserable and despised, the little ones of the earth, becomes to him more and more impossible of realisation. It is thus that the Pope appears to him, at the presentation of Peter's Pence, or celebrating mass at Saint

Peter's. "As if in a setting of goldsmith's work, his thin waxen body seemed to be stiffened in his white vestments heavy with gold embroidery. He kept a hieratic and haughty immobility, like a dried-up idol, gilded centuries ago, among the smoke of sacrifices. Amid the death-like stillness of the face the eyes alone lived,

eyes sparkling like black diamonds, fixed far off, out of earth, on the Infinite. He had not a look for the crowd; he lowered his eyes neither to right nor to left, absorbed in heaven and unknowing what was happening at his feet. And this idol, thus carried about, as if deaf, dumb, and blind in spite of the brilliance of his eyes, in the midst of this frenzied crowd which it seemed neither to hear nor to see, assumed a formidable majesty, a disquieting grandeur, all the stiffness of dogma, all the immobility of the wrappings with which it had been exhumed and which alone held it erect."

Certainly this is not the view of any possible priest that ever wore cassock. These are the reflections, not of the Abbé Froment, but of the naturalist Goliath swelling in indignation against the very shadow of the Christian habit in its distinctive features of self-discipline and contemplation.

But the Abbé Froment is only a mouthpiece. His Christianity is nothing but a vague humanitarianism, deriving its inspiration indeed from the teaching of Galilee but divorced as far as possible from all that gives body and definiteness to that teaching, from doctrine, from discipline whether of self or society, from the great distinctively Christian virtues and from that habit of mind and soul which alone makes the sustained practice of charity possible. A man, to whom religious contemplation is a madness and the obligation of purity a degrading superstition, cannot possibly