"Then who more likely, who more certain, to fulfill that law to hitherto unattained perfection, than He who came to obey, not outward nature merely, but, as Bacon meant, the inner ideas, the spirit of Nature, which is the will of God? He who came to do utterly, not His own will, but the will of the Father who sent him? Who is so presumptuous as to limit the future triumphs of science? Surely no one who has watched her giant strides during the last century. Shall Stephenson and Faraday, and the inventors of the calculating machine, and the electric telegraph, have fulfilled such wonders by their weak and partial obedience to the Will of God expressed in things'-and he who obeyed, even unto the death, have possessed no higher power than theirs?"

'Indeed," I said, "your words stagger me. But there is another old objection which they have reawakened in my mind. You will say I am shifting my ground sadly. But you must pardon me.'

"Let us hear. They need not be irrelevant. The unconscious logic of association is often deeper and truer than any syllogism."

These modern discoveries in medicine seem to show that Christ's miracles may be attributed to natural causes.

"And thereby justify them. For what else have I been arguing. The difficulty lies only in the rationalist's shallow and sensuous view of Nature, and in his ambiguous slip-slop trick of using the word natural to mean, in one sentence, ' material,' and in the next, as I use it, only 'normal and orderly.' Every new wonder in medicine which this great age discovers-what does it prove, but that Christ need have broken no natural laws to do that of old, which can be done now without breaking them-if you will but believe that these gifts of healing are all inspired and revealed by Him. who is the Great Physician, the Life, the Lord of that vital energy by whom all cures are wrought.

"The surgeons of St. George's make the boy walk who has been lame from his mother's womb. But have they given life to a single bone or muscle of his limbs ? They have only put them into that position-those circumstances, in which the God-given life in them can have its free and normal play, and produce the cure which they only assist. I claim that miracle of science, as I do all future ones, as the inspiration of Him who made the lame to walk in Judea, not by producing new organs, but by His creative will-quickening and liberating those which already existed.

"The mesmerist, again, says that he can cure a spirit of infirmity, an hysteric or paralytic patient, by shedding forth on them his own vital energy; and, therefore he will have it, that Christ's miracles were but mesmeric feats. I grant, for the sake of argument, that he possesses the power which he claims; though I may think his facts too new, too undigested, often too exaggerated, to claim my certain assent. But, I say, I take you on your own ground; and, indeed, if man be the image of God, his vital energy may, for aught I know, be able, like God's, to communicate some spark of life. But then, what must have been the vital energy of Him who was the life itself; who was filled without measure with the spirit, not only of humanity, but with that of God the Lord and Giver of life? Do but let the Bible tell its own story; grant, for the sake of argument, the truth of the dogmas which it asserts throughout, and it becomes a consistent whole. When a man begins, as Strauss does, by assuming the falsity of its conclusions, no wonder if he finds its premises a fragmentary chaos of contradictions."

"And what else," asked Eleanor, passionately, "what else is the meaning of that highest human honor, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, but a perennial token that the same life-giving spirit is the free right of all ?"

And thereon followed happy, peaceful, hopeful words, which the reader, if he call himself a Christian, ought to be able to imagine for himself. I am afraid that, writing from memory, I should do as little justice to them as I have to the dean's arguments in this chapter. Of the consequences which they produced in me, I will speak anon.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

NEMESIS.

It was a month or more before I summoned courage to ask after my cousin.

Eleanor looked solemnly at me.

"Did you not know it?

He is dead."

Dead!" I was almost stunned by the announcement. Of typhus fever. He died three weeks ago; and not only he, but the servant who brushed his clothes, and the shopman, who had, a few days before, brought him a new coat home." How did you learn all this?"

"From Mr Crossthwaite. But the strangest part of the sad story is to come. Crossthwaite's suspicions were aroused by some incidental circumstance, and knowing of Downes's death, and the fact that you most probably caught your fever in that miserable being's house, he made such inquiries as satisfied him that it was no other than your cousin's coat-" "Which covered the corpses in that fearful chamber ?" "It was indeed."

Just, awful God! And this was the consistent Nemesis of all poor George's thrift and cunning, of his determination to carry the buy-cheap-and-sell-dear commercialism, in which he had been brought up, into every act of life! Did I rejoice? No; all revenge, all spite had been scourged out of me. I mourned for him as for a brother, till the thought flashed across me- -Lillian was free! Half unconscious, I stammered her name inquiringly."

'Judge for yourself," answered Eleanor, mildly, yet with a deep, severe meaning in her tone.

I was silent.

The tempest in my heart was ready to burst forth again; but she, my guardian-angel, soothed it for me.

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She is much changed; sorrow and sickness-for she, too, has had the fever-and, alas! less resignation or peace within, than those who love her would have wished to see, have worn her down. Little remains now of that loveliness."

Which I idolized in my folly !".

"Thank God, thank God! that you see that at last: I knew it all along. I knew that there was nothing there for

your heart to rest upon-nothing to satisfy your intellect― and, therefore, I tried to turn you from your dream. I did it harshly, angrily, too sharply, yet not explicitly enough. I ought to have made allowances for you. I should have known how enchanting, intoxicating, mere outward perfection must have been to one of your perceptions, shut out so long as you had been from the beautiful in art and nature. But I was cruel. Alas! I had not then learned to sympathize; and I have often since felt with terror, that I, too, may have many of your sins to answer for; that I, even I, helped to drive you on to bitterness and despair."

"Oh, do not say so!

nothing but good."

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You have done to me, meant to me,

'Be not too sure of that. You little know me. You little know the pride which I have fostered-even the mean anger against you, for being the protégée of any one but myself. That exclusiveness, and shyness, and proud reserve, is the bane of our English character-it has been the bane of mine— daily I strive to root it out. Come-I will do so now. You wonder why I am here. You shall hear somewhat of my story; and do not fancy that I am showing you a peculiar mark of honor or confidence. If the history of my life can be of use to the meanest, they are welcome to the secrets of my inmost heart."

"I was my parents' only child, an heiress, highly born, and highly educated. Every circumstance of humanity which could pamper pride was mine, and I battened on the poison. I painted, I sang, I wrote in prose and verse-they told me, not without success. Men said that I was beautiful-I knew that myself, and reveled and gloried in the thought. Accustomed to see myself the centre of all my parents' hopes and fears, to be surrounded by flatterers, to indulge in secret the still more fatal triumph of contempt for those I thought less gifted than myself, self became the centre of my thoughts. Pleasure was all I thought of. But not what the vulgar call pleasure. That I disdained, while like you, I worshiped all that was pleasurable to the intellect and the taste. beautiful was my God. I lived, in deliberate intoxication, on poetry, music, painting, and every antitype of them which I could find in the world around. At last I met with-one whom you once saw. He first awoke in me the sense of the vast duties and responsibilities of my station-his example first taught me to care for the many rather than for the few. It was a blessed lesson: yet even that I turned to poison, by

The

making self, still self, the object of my very benevolence. To be a philanthropist, a philosopher, a feudal queen, amid the blessings and the praise of dependent hundreds-that was my new ideal; for that I turned the whole force of my intellect to the study of history, of social and economic questions. From Bentham and Malthus to Fourrier and Proudhon, I read them all. I made them all fit into that idol-temple of self which I was rearing, and fancied that I did my duty, by becoming one of the great ones of the earth. My ideal was not the crucified Nazarene, but some Hairoun Alraschid, in luxurious splendor, pampering his pride by bestowing as a favor those mercies which God commands as the right of all. I thought to serve God, forsooth, by serving Mammon and myself. Fool that I was! I could not see God's handwriting on the wall against me. 'How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven!'

"You gave me, unintentionally, a warning hint. The capabilities which I saw in you made me suspect that those below might be more nearly my equals than I had yet fancied. Your vivid descriptions of the misery among whole classes of workmen-misery caused and ever increased by the very system of society itself-gave a momentary shock to my fairy palace. They drove me back upon the simple old question which has been asked by every honest heart, age after age 'What right have I to revel in luxury, while thousands are starving? Why do I pride myself on doling out to them small fractions of that wealth, which, if sacrificed utterly and at once, might help to raise hundreds to a civilization as high as my own.' I could not face the thought; and angry with you for having awakened it, however unintentionally, I shrank back behind the pitiable worn-out fallacy, that luxury was necessary to give employment. I knew that it was a fallacy; I knew that the labor spent in producing unnecessary things for one rich man, may just as well have gone in producing necessaries for a hundred poor, or employ the architect and the painter for public bodies as well as private individuals. That even for the production of luxuries, the monopolizing demand of the rich was not required-that the appliances of real civilization, the landscapes, gardens, stately rooms, baths, books, pictures, works of art, collections of curiosities, which now went to pamper me alone-me, one single human soul -might be helping, in an associate society, to civilize a hundred families, now debarred from them by isolated poverty, without robbing me of an atom of the real enjoyment or