Leave me alone, like good souls. I shall come to you again when I have got over this shock, or whatever you like to call it,"

The last words were spoken more like Joel, though they were clearly wrung from him by the exigencies of the moment, as he stood there pale, with the chill of exposure to the storm not thrown off, depressed, tormented by the appropriation to himself of blame and punishment in the disaster which had happened, and which, to the others, was far removed from him and them, except in their common humanity with the sufferers. It constituted a mystery they could not by any means comprehend.

There was nothing for it save for them to go without him, dispirited in their turn, and perplexed by his desertion.

"Joel Wray's heart d' be in the right place," said Long Dick as they drove away, "but there be a want on ballast in the lad."

21

Wray, was free to come and go; Long Dick would have admitted that at the worst, and Joel was entitled to more than freedom-to a welcome from the man whose preserver he had been. Besides, Joel had established an amnesty between them, even in that nearest matter which went to Long Dick's very heart, and smote it with untold pangs. Mrs. Balls and Joel, natural opponents as they might be, were both right, Pleasance Hatton should please herself, a free field and no favour was all that an honest man could ask.

Long Dick himself had been accustomed to pride himself on his honesty. He knew, as well as another, that though big and strong as Saul among the people, and shrewd and wise enough in country matters, so as to be respected and prospering, he was also slow and dull in what he called "book know" and in manners not only compared to Pleasance, but to this slip of a stuck mechanic and day'sMoreover Dick was keenly con

man.

But Pleasance could not think too ten-scious, ever since he had been an humble derly of the generous sensitiveness and worshipper of Pleasance Hatton's, that he self-accusation which had come between was liable to disgrace and degrade himand separated her and Joel Wray for the self by going "on the spree," even though time. it were, in some measure, she who unwittingly and unwillingly drove him to it. But he thought he was honest; he was willing to stand or fall upon his honesty.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE DEAD BURIED

AND THE LIVING

COMFORTED.

JOEL WRAY'S dejection was talked of like everything else at Saxford.

Long Dick felt and confessed, not without rue, because Joel had saved his life, but with candid emphasis, that, when he came to think of it, he could be reconciled to his deliverer's staying away altogether, and never turning up again. Mrs. Balls said openly and loudly, out of Pleasance's hearing, for Pleasance must please herself, that it was an ill wind which blew nobody good, and that she for one would not complain of the storm which had disturbed the thatch on the newly-taken-in stacks, half unroofed the pigeon-house, and wrought greater devastations still on the coast of Cheam, if it had blown Joel Wray clean away from Manor Farm.

But when Clem Blennerhasset went over to Cheam within the fortnight, he brought back word that Joel Wray was coming home-he had used the expression himself- next day. Clem added the information that the bodies of the drowned Norwegian seamen had come ashore and had been buried, and that Joel had been at their funeral.

Long Dick said nothing farther.

Joel

Neither was Dick altogether without hope to encourage him in his honesty, and in his moderation and forbearance. He had been first on the field; his friendship with Pleasance was fact; her evident, undisguised, while quite an old-established maidenly, liking for Joel Wray, with his novelty, his attractions which charmed most women, and his eager homage to herself, might be but a passing fancy, all the more superficial that it was so openly displayed.

Long Dick would not let go his lingering hope. He would not realize defeat with the great purpose of his life frustrated, and only an echoing blank, which might grow hideous, left behind, while a single thread of the strand remained:

Mrs. Balls, being a woman, saw farther. She received the news of Joel Wray's return with a rebellious groan, and with the angry comment that "it would take long ort' devil he were found dead along on the wall."

turbed, had never lost her perfect trust in Pleasance, however puzzled and disJoel Wray. Kind, generous, manly Joel in his laborer's jacket, whose spirit was stirred within him by the woes of others, who had been outwardly gruff and impa

tient because he was inwardly so gentle, | countered Joel on his way back from and who had stayed behind to pay the last Cheam. honor in reverence and tenderness to the stranger dead.

He looked grave, and a little worn still, as if he had come through some trouble, and been having a trying time of it; but he smiled to see her, and stopped at once, calling her attention to the beauty of the evening, and saying that he could not have enough of it, and was loth to go in, for he was not wearied by his walk, and he was not wanting his supper yet. He should

Pleasance had always known absolutely in her own mind that he would reappear presently at the manor farm, as he had reappeared in summer after his first advent in spring. What she felt on hearing that he was soon coming again was not a wild throb of reactionary joy, as intense as the tension of grief and fear which had pre-prefer to loiter about and see the last of ceded it, but a soft, all-pervading pleasure, with a longing that was almost painful in its exceeding sweetness, to go forth to meet him, and comfort and praise him.

this unclouded sunset, one of the most simply gorgeous in its peace that he had ever beheld. Would she stroll with him to the first ridge of the moorland? It was not above ten minutes' walk from where they stood, and the prospect there, though more confined, would be even finer in its way, and then he could tell her all that he had been doing in the recovery of the bodies of the poor lost foreign fellows, and the laying them in the earth.

Pleasance complied at once, coloring a little with that rich radiant color of hers which made her, while it lasted, so beautiful a woman.

He was languid, if no longer oppressed, and sought quiet and a soothing influence, which he had an instinct that he would find on the moorland ridge in such companionship.

It was Indian-summer weather that had settled down on the east country, after the first tempest-blast of autumn. It promised an interregnum of sunshine and mellow warmth all the more acceptable that it was crisped with a tinge of frost in the mornings and evenings - before the regular gales of the early winter should sweep the fields, which wanted wood to make them brown, and which were as yet only white after harvest with a cold blueness creeping into the grass green of the mead- Joel Wray did not say much as they ows, and meeting the greying russet of went beyond a passing question about the hedges. But it was not November how things had been going on at the yet-it was no more than the first of Oc-farm in his absence, and an observation tober. The flood of golden light which on the partridges they startled in the turbathed the bare fields, glowed copper-nip-field and on the rooks which were color in the ditches, and flung an orange going home to roost. glory on the purple moorland, and against which the gaunt arms and white sails of the windmills, and the umber sails of the barges, stood out in bold relief, was met by an earth still unblighted, and with a bloom in its bareness, having fruit-wild haws, and blackberries, and domestic apples and pears, where flowers had been, and a few flowers still, silverweed and mallow by the roadside, and marigolds and convolvuluses in the cottage gardens. Pleasance had gone out in the unbroken, unshaded sunset splendor which was harmless and undazzling, to look through There was at this time a curious blendthe stream of slanting beams at the cows ing of boyishness and manliness in Joel, coming lowing home from the stubbie, and in that lay a part of his charm, espewhere they were finding the last and rich- cially to such a woman as Pleasance Hatest clover crop. She was standing thus, ton, in whose nature undeveloped motherwith the yellow gables and olive thatch of liness was a strong element, and whose the manor-house behind her, by the side love would always crave to give as well as of the field-path which joined the road to to take protection along with every other the village the very field-path where benefit. Sometimes this boyishness of Joel Wray had first seen Pleasance, as Joel Wray's had a strain in it of imperishe rode up sitting on the unsaddled back ousness and refractoriness, belonging to of the cart-horse Punch, with Long Dick the spoiledness of which he had once walking by her side, and Miles and Phillis spoken to Long Dick. But at the present Plum following behind when she en-moment it was the wholly winning boyish

-

"Ah! now I can speak to you about it all," he said, half wearily, half in pleased anticipation of an outlet to his pent-up feelings, as he threw himself down on a flat stone and clasped his hands above his head. "Will you sit down beside me, Pleasance, and listen; but first tell me, ain't you fond of this spot?"

ness of a manly nature, essentially youthful in its manliness, and which was recovering from a blow or check and looking round ready and willing to take, without any churlishness, whatever good things should be granted to it in compensation.

Pleasance could tell him that she was very fond of the spot where they were resting.

It was, as he had said, not more than ten minutes' walk from Manor Farm, in the opposite direction from the village; but it had such an atmosphere of solitude with exceptions which only tended to make the solitude in other respects more felt that it might have been a nook among the everlasting hills hundreds of miles away from the flat, tame, bullockfeeding, and milk-producing east country. The high level of the land rose here from pasture to moorland, and being broken into a dip between a greater and less heather and furze crowned summit, it shut the spectator into a purple and golden hollow, from which nothing could be seen of cultivation or civilization save the swinging arms of one of the unfailing windmills, and the gliding sails of an equally unfailing barge on one of the slow rivers which flowed through the moor as through the pasture-land.

"Yes, they are laid at rest; we have been able to do that for them," he said, with a face that contracted and a voice that grew stern, and sunk into a smothered groan, as if recollection had brought back upon him the mental burden which had been hardly lifted off.

"But why should you, of all men, reproach yourself, Joel?" Pleasance could not refrain from asking in remonstrance; you who strove to the utmost to avert the poor sailors' fate."

66

"You do not understand none of you understand," he kept saying, half impatiently, half wearily. "I am not so clear about there having been no possibility of putting out a boat; but it may have been as they said; Gannet Bay may be such ground that no boat could have lived there, and to send out one would only have been to destruction; and the boatmen might have known that so thoroughly, that, rightly enough, neither money nor influence, nor anything else, could have urged them to the rash deed. But look here, Pleasance: if I had ridden first to Dene-Fleet, I should have got the rockets at once; the lost time would have been saved; the rockets would have come in time; a line might have reached the vessel, and these five men and the boy who are Pleasance had been wont to come here now (all that are left of them) stark and at rare leisure times, to find herself alone, still in Cheam graveyard might have been except for the windmill, and it might be a as hale and hearty as we are this night, barge, with the heather, the furze, and the returning to comfort their wives and mothsky; to fancy herself away in a northern ers, to get fresh ships, and go on new venwilderness; to look for plovers' and moor-tures until they were grown old and hens' nests; to listen to the crow of the moorcock; to gather little tufts of blue and pink liverwort, yellow rock-rose, and white grass of Parnassus, in addition to heather-bells when they were in season.

But whether the shoulder of the moor lay in the clear light of the morning, or dappled by the great cloud-shadows of noon, or in the tempered serenity of the afternoon sun, or as now under the burning gold, passing into rose and crimson and purple, and wavering and waning away again in its glory, into pink and lilac, amber and buff, and the intermediate dim sea-green that terminated in the deepest blue, and in which the first star or the new moon hung themselves, she was satisfied that her bit of moor was nearest perfection at sunset.

grey, and-escaping the sea at last-might have died in their beds with their children and grandchildren about them."

"But it seemed most expedient that Long Dick should go," argued Pleasance, divided between feeling half hurt for Long Dick-who, she was certain, had done his best and experiencing the most genuine compassion for the pain told by the voice at her elbow. "You might have failed, to begin with, as he did, and then And she hesitated, and spoke again as if impelled to speak, in low tones of earnestness and awe. "It is God's will, though it is a mystery to us why He should not have saved them. The men were in his hands all the while. Their time had come. He suffered them to die thus. It is very sad; but if it be his will, it cannot be altogether wrong and miserable, can it?"

"I should not have failed," Joel insisted, perversely going back to the first count in her speech; "there might have been delay, but it would not have been for long.

Pleasance had not much care for the utter unworldliness of the marriage she was about to make. She had identified herself with that class, who, being so low that they need fear no fall, can afford to be unworldly; and she believed that they two could command between them such qualities and faculties, in addition to a little fund of ready money to begin upon, as should enable them to start in life without debt, and to go on with a fair prospect of a reasonable amount of prosperity in their station.

ion is not here understood, as in the deistical speculations of the eighteenth century, a religion which is the same in all countries and times, and is equally accepted "by saint, by savage, or by sage." That is, "natural" is not here opposed to "revealed." On the contrary, the religion here spoken of is conceived as revealed in different degrees to different men, and as developing itself through the course of history by means of successive revelations. It is called natural only in distinction from supernatural religion, Joel Wray had shown himself, as far as and even to supernatural religion it stands he was known, perfectly sober and well- in no opposition. The object of drawing principled. He had placed himself in the the distinction was not to throw doubt debatable position of a young man who on the supernatural, but merely, since had chosen to abandon his original calling, doubt has been thrown on it, to inquire and was a working-man on the tramp, do- how much or how little of religion would ing odd jobs, and hiring himself here and remain to us if all that part of it which is there; nevertheless, he was active, indus- founded on supernatural occurrences had trious, and wonderfully capable in work to be abandoned. Accordingly, whereas that was strange to him. The instability in the old sense of the phrase, natural or eccentricity which had caused a young religion was exclusive of Christianity, in working-man-who had been so worthily the sense in which it is here used it must ambitious that he must have spent every be regarded as including Christianity, spare hour on self-improvement, in order to get the culture which he had won to frustrate his own aims and spoil his future, by giving way to fancifulness, had stopped short of doing him farther injury.

And this eccentricity, as Pleasance preferred to call it, had a certain sweet fascination for her, belonging, as it seemed to do, to the unworldly chivalrous side of his nature. Joel Wray worked to help; he did not care so much for the particular nature of the work, or for the wages. Like the god Apollo, he would be an assistant all over the world.

since Christianity is one of the great steps in the historical development of religion.

But the reader will have noticed that I have deviated from common usage still more in my treatment of the word "religion" than of the word "natural." This indeed was unavoidable, and it will more and more be felt in religious discussion how necessary it is to give some fixed and definite meaning to this word. Till lately this necessity was less felt because the word religion was identified in most minds with a visible institution of commanding power. Religion meant a vast and vague There might be a little conceit, as class of things connected with the ChrisPleasance was fain to admit (indeed the tian Church, as politics means a class of curious compound in Joel Wray of boy- things connected with the State; and so ish conceit and manly humility was very long as the vast organization of the Roman manifest), in this desultoriness; but it was Church, with her temporal power una gracious conceit, and how could Pleas- touched and shielded by great states, subance be angry or even vexed with the ec-sisted in the very heart of civilization, all centricity which had brought Joel from being a thriving mechanic in a town, to be a day-laborer, hoeing wheat and cutting corn, and electrifying her with his knowledge and grace and learning, to love her at Manor Farm?

From Macmillan's Magazine.
NATURAL RELIGION.

VII.

THE reader of these papers will have long since remarked that by natural relig

other Churches, even those most hostile to her, reaped the advantage of the definiteness which she gave to the word religion. Her rapid decline has thrown a number of questions open, and those who now think about religion do not put before their minds instinctively the body of doctrine taught by the Christian Church, and ask themselves whether it is true, but they begin by inquiring whether this body of doctrine, or something different, is what is meant by religion.

Hitherto then it has been supposed that there could be no serious dispute as to what is meant, at least in a general way,