denly, an indescribable perturbation passed through my being, there was a swimming before my eyes as of a white glimmer in which I felt myself enveloped. I thought I heard a voice murmur to my ear: "Tolle, lege!" I turned round, believing it was Marie Alicia who spoke to me. I was alone.

She had no thought of a miracle, but recognized at once that she was the subject of an hallucination. She felt that faith had laid hold of her, as she had desired, by the heart, and was so grateful that a torrent of tears flooded her face. She tried to pray to the "unknown God" who had called her to Himself, but broke down in tears and sobs, and fell crushed to the earth. The nun who had arrived to shut the church heard the groaning and weeping, and came not without terror to seek its cause; but Aurore managed to evade her scrutiny and to return to her cell undiscovered.

This storm of religious emotion did not leave her where she was. It had driven her into a new region far from her late comrades, where she found herself floating onward on a calm yet strong current. It was characteristic of the girl that she made no secret of her conversion and cared not a straw for the jeers of the diables.' In truth, however, they did not jeer. She had been the leader in revolt and was christened Madcap" by the nuns, and her return from the rebels' camp did much to tone down their almost savage violence, and indeed in time to half efface the old sharp divisions of class among the pupils. The history of the following and last year of the convent life shows us Aurore gradually feeling her way to a less intoxicating and more manageable form of religjous sentiment. At first the ardor of the girl carried her to the point of deciding to be a nun, and she actually began to help one of the menial sisters in the drudgeries of the place. But such zeal naturally

alarmed the authorities, who, if they were themselves nuns, knew well enough that it would never do to incur the suspicion of having proselytized the granddaughter of Madame Dupin. So Madame Alicia, to whom she confided her wish to take the veil, threw a judicious drop of cold water on her longings. A similar worldly wisdom was displayed by the Abbé de Prémord, the girl's confessor, who recognized in her exaggerated accounts of wrongdoing a nervous disorder, and counselled, in place of penance, plenty of activity and amusement. And so the feverish agitation and the morbid longing for the life of a recluse passed, and Aurore became again, if not exactly a harum scarum Tom-boy," at least a bright companionable girl.

Perhaps this return to a comparatively orthodox faith, in half-conscious submission to the influence of the convent, is hardly less memorable than the invention of the Corambé cult. What possibilities of religious emotion, one reflects, must have existed in a girl who, after having been so effectively drilled in the Voltairean scorn, could experience an intense joy in that act of self-prostration in the convent church! And on the heels of this reflection comes another: How might it have fared with Aurore if there had been no grandmother to instil the pride of scepticism at that decisive moment in her development? If she had then fallen into the hands, say, of Madame Alicia, is it not conceivable that we might have had, instead of the errant romancer, a female St. Bernard, or a second Sister Dora? And yet there are who seem to say that genius ever hies straight along its one path of achievement, taking nothing of its direction or of its velocity from its life circumstances.- Longman's Magazine.

confidence of a historical judgment singularly decisive, singularly keen, and, we should add, singularly and quite unreasonably sceptical. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the vividly sceptical bias of Dr. Martineau's historical judgment and the still more vivid devoutness of his spiritual nature.

In the region of conscience, there is no more truly religious writer in England, and certainly none at once so powerful and so devotional. In the region of historical criticism, there is hardly any with so iconoclastic a bias toward pulling to pieces all that the religious sentiment of mankind has slowly built up. The scorn with which Dr. Martineau treats the beliefs of all the Christian ages is, we suspect, expressed with a force that he himself has no power to realize. It has never occurred to him, we should think, that the same spirit which inspired the spiritual and moral revelation of which he thinks so highly, may have guided with as much providential care the impression produced on the mind of the universal Church by which that revelation was received. Is it not a very arbitrary treatment of history, to insulate the divine revelation as Dr. Martineau supposes it to have been given through Jesus Christ, aud to ignore entirely, as if it were quite irrelevant and without any bearing on the divine meaning and purpose of that revelation, the impression produced by it on the minds of generation after generation, as if that were really no essential part of the phenomena of Christianity? To us it seems an essential part of the supernatural course of the Christian religion that the theology of St. Paul took so profound a hold of the Church, and that the theology of St. Paul was so soon developed into the theology of St. John. It is about as strange a feat for a thinker of Dr. Martineau's force and rank to treat all these fresh and natural testimonies to the character of Christ's nature and teaching in the Church, as if they were mere refractions and exaggerations of human loyalty to an exceptionally pure human being-a mere nimbus, as Dr. Martineau calls them, encircling his head in their imaginationas it would be for an astronomer to treat the corona and the red prominences of the sun as if they were mere subjective phenomena that had no interest except as throwing light upon the mind of the observer. We can understand such a contention on the part of those who do not believe in Jesus Christ as a special revelation of God at all; but for those who, like Dr. Martineau, do so believe, to treat the steady development of the mind of the Church concerning him as a mere growth of human error that bears no likeness at all to the divine significance of the real fig

ure concerning whom all this halo of illusion (as Dr. Martineau holds it) sprang up, is like giving an explanation of the rainbow which dispenses with the sun. The real difference between Dr. Martineau's conception of spiritual authority in these matters and our own, is this, that Dr. Martineau attributes to God's revelation only the very few residual phenomena of Christ's life which his destructive and very arbitrary analysis leaves us after it has done its fatal work; while we attribute to it not only the great majority of the facts of our Lord's life as recorded in the Gospels, but the great majority of the impressions produced upon the minds of his disciples and followers as they grew and shaped the traditions of the apostles and the disciples who constituted the Church of the primitive age. Dr. Martineau regards the divine revelation as limited to the life of him who first removed the veil. We regard it as extending to the minds. and lives of those from whose eves the veil was removed, and as shaping the growth of their faith and love. Nor can we conceive an authority limited as Dr. Martineau would seem inclined to limit it. He brings us to a great tree, tears away its leaves, hews down its branches, strips off its bark, and then tells us to regard the naked and fatally injured wreck as the true life of the whole. We say that we must look for the life of the whole in the collective phenomena; not only those of Christ's life (though we regard Dr. Martineau's analysis of that life as one of the most wonderful achievements of destructive criticism with which, from a man of great genius, and-in a sense too-of great religious genius, we ever met), but also in the life of the community chiefly affected. by it, in the faith in which it flowered, in the actions in which it bore fruit, in the devotions which it generated, in the institutions to which it gave birth-in a word, in the whole results which it evolved, though not in anything which can be shown by reasonable criticism to be a mere excrescence on, or a parasitic growth upon, that life. It seems to us that Dr. Martineau's conception of authority, as limited to the conscience alone, is infinitely too narrow. The conscience, no doubt, is the centre of authority over the life of man. But the conscience lays hold, by all sorts of delicate filaments, of the tastes, of the imagination, of the affections, of the social

system; and in all these its manifestations, the divine inspiration appears to us as real a shaping power while it moulds the confessions and attitudes of the whole society toward Christ, as it is even when it first manifests itself through Christ himself. It would be as easy for a child to pick out everything in the conduct of its parents that it might safely disregard, and so to lay bare the only justification for true filial reverence, as for a critic to discharge historical Christianity, as Dr. Martineau does, of nine-tenths of its actual contents, and to fix upon the one-tenth which is supposed to give all its vitality to the remainder. He seems to forget that the same "authority" which appealed to the conscience of man through Christ, spoke no less in the gradual development of the Christian worship and the gradual growth of the confessions of the Christian creed. We can hardly understand how a thinker so great as Dr. Martineau was capable of writing down, for instance, such a canon of criticism as the following, which he calls"the rule for separating the divine from the human in the origin of our religion :”—“The former will be found, if anywhere, in what Jesus of Nazareth himself was, in spiritual character and moral relation to God. The latter will be found in what was thought about his person, functions, and office. It was the Providence of history that gave us him it was the men of history that dressed up the theory of him and till we compel the latter to stand aside, and let us through to look upon his living face, we can never seize the permanent essence of the gift." That is a canon conceived just as if God did not kindle the faith, as truly as present the object of faith. There is no real antithesis corresponding to Dr. Martineau's. No doubt we must look, as earnestly as we may, at the living face, but does it appear a likely mode of doing so, to prepossess ourselves, as Dr. Martineau does, with the strongest possible prejudice against the legacy left us in the life and teaching and traditions of those who were the earliest gazers on the living face! And if look ing at the living face means, as it means in Dr. Martineau's book, looking at a Christ who never once predicted his death and resurrection, though it is admitted that he must have had sad forebodings of the former, who never claimed to be the Messiah at all, but only imposed a stern veto

on Peter's disposition so to proclaim him. instead of solemnly pronouncing him blessed in having received God's own revelation of the truth, who, in fact, claimed nothing further than to continue John the Baptist's message of an approaching kingdom of God of which he himself was not to be the central figure, who never worked a miracle, and after his death on the Cross, never communicated to his disciples anything but a spiritual impression of his resurrection, who had no sort of connection with the mythical Christ, as Dr. Martineau regards him, of the Fourth Gospel-a figure, according to Dr. Martineau, first conceived in the middle of the second century

and, in a word, who can be safely credited only with such acts and words as plainly transcend the moral level of the narrators"-if this is what "tooking at the living face" is to signify, we would just as soon look at the living face in a dark room, and fancy ourselves after doing so vastly more familiar with its features than those who had only studied them in a well-lighted mirror.

As a specimen of Dr. Martineau's scepticism, we may take his reasons for believing that Christ only professed to repeat and continue the message of John the Baptist, an assumption contradicted by every Gospel we have, and of which Dr. Martineau persuades himself on the slenderest conjectural evidence which it is possible to imagine. This evidence is derived from the statement in the Acts of the Apostles that upward of twenty years after the Crucifixion, a body of disciples was found at Ephesus under the teaching of Apollos, who had "taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John." This Dr. Martineau interprets as meaning that "for neither prophet did the Baptist's sect assert a higher claim than that of herald of the kingdom, but regarded both as warning messengers to prepare the world for meeting its Judge. That is a fair conjecture, though it is little more, and the fact might be susceptible probably of twenty different explanations, if we had fuller knowledge of the history; but how does it show that the Baptist sect which held this, if they did hold it, knew anything adequate of the teaching of the disciples of Christ? We know, if we know anything, that John the Baptist, before his own death, either for his own sake or for that of his disci

ples, sent messengers from his prison to elicit from Christ what his own claim was ; and it is easy to suppose that disciples who had been separated from John the Baptist by his imprisonment, and who had afterward migrated to Ephesus, would have gone on teaching that, as Jesus had accepted John's baptism, he was merely one of the greatest of his followers, and had never even claimed to be the Messiah. Yet Dr. Martineau builds upon it the astounding inference that all the express assertions of the Gospels in a different sense are ex post facto inventions, and that before the visionary appearance of Christ to his disciples after his crucifixion, they had never heard from him of any claim to be the founder of the new kingdom, and that that claim rested wholly on the inferences which they drew from their newly formed impression of his spiritual existence and restored energy. Surely it is hard to find an instance of any great man's more credulous incredulity. What would Dr. Martineau have put into the mouth of Jesus as the reply to John's messengers? Surely it would have been this: "Go and show John again the things which ye do hear and see the blind do not receive their sight; the lame do not walk; the lepers are not cleansed; the deaf do not hear; the dead are not raised up; and least of all have the poor had the Gospel preached to them" !-for such an edition of the Gospel as Dr. Martineau alone authenticates, a Gospel of beauty without power,

of promise without performance, would have had no chance of startling, or eliciting blessings from, the poor.

To our mind at least, Dr. Martineau's conception of divine authority as manifested in the whole development of the Jewish and Christian revelations, seems a conception of failure to express itself adequately, instead of a conception of revealing power. If there is one thing more certain than another in that history, it is that the belief in God's supernatural power, as manifested both in the sharp struggles and conquests of the inner life and in the wonderful signs given in the external fields of history and nature, was the one connecting thread of their history, and moulded the steadily expectant character of their anticipations of the future. If Christ's life, death, and resurrection did not fit into this long line of supernatural manifestation, it was not the future for which the people of Israel had been disciplined and prepared; it was only a half-and-half supernaturalism, and not of a piece with the long traditional development of which, in almost all Christians' belief, it forms the consummation and the crown. Divine authority which is shut up in the conscience exclusively, and extends to no other part of life, may suit a purely philosophical system like Dr. Martineau's, but it does not represent in any sense the drift of the teaching of either the Hebrew or the Christian Church.-Spectator.

-Academy.

ON all sides I hear that Monte Carlo is not what it was. Its most devoted admirers are gradually becoming faithless in their allegiance; and their enthusiasm strikes me as chillier as year succeeds year. The deep blue, tideless Mediterranean is there; the silver gray background of mysterious mountains still shelters this fascinating spot; we still can wander in orange gardens and groves of lemon; the streets and lanes are scented with geranium and mimosa bloom; roses, violets, anemones, are as plentiful as primroses and daffodils in an English garden, the sun stili shines alluringly, the air is charged with exhilaration, but over the whole place hangs the atmosphere of unhealthiness, the miasma of decay and desolation. Under each crumpled rose-leaf is a bright-eyed asp; beneath the golden fruit in these Hesperides gardens gleams the foul-fanged adder. The Paradise made by God is there in its transcendent beauty, but the poison is paramount, distilled by the devil.

I was ever anxious to be introduced to the many joys and delights of Monte Carlo. Year followed year and still found me chained to the oar, bound to the mast of incessant toil, doomed to fogs and days of Egyptian darkness, and gas-lighted gloom, and east winds, and persistent melancholy, while others, luckier as I ever thought, could fly away like the swallows to happier, sunnier climes. The torture of what I then thought servitude seemed more intense when boxes of flowers arrived, beautiful but scentless-presents from Kellers, the daily rendezvous of Monte Carlo visitors-roses that smelt not of the English garden, mignonette that somehow lacked what Matthew Arnold calls the "homely cottage smell," and clusters of oranges and lemons with leaves attached which ever reminded one of the decorative wall-papers of William Morris. It seemed to me from these tributes of affection, from these glowing accounts of Monte Carlo life, from the happy tone that came in letters from old friends, from whispers sent from hill-side villas and fruit gardens, that there must be Horatian ease, indeed, to such as were lucky enough to

enjoy the hospitality of kindly patrons like the modern Mæcenas.

The difficulty always was in my mind to associate this "grateful ease" with the daily and deadly presence of the gambling rooms, to separate the refinement and graciousness of Monte Carlo life, from the intense vulgarity and rowdyism that are somehow or other inseparable from games of chance; to believe that there was indeed one place in the world that resisted and withstood the despair and decay that inevitably follow in the gambler's train. Chance willed it that holiday rambles from town to town made me familiar in old days with the most popular gambling resorts of the Continent. I think I saw them all at their best; at the period of blossoming, not of decay. I have enjoyed the pleasures of (the gaming casino apart) the delicious pine woods that surround the picturesque Spa: the neatness and order, the toy-box symmetry of the sweltering little Rhine Valley, where, on the banks of a tributary of the great river, kings and emperors and princes came to drink the waters and to woo the goddess of fortune at Ems Baden. I have stood aghast at the glittering crowd, luxurious but still refined, reckless, but still aristocratic, that almost dazzled the senses in the beautiful gaming rooms at Wiesbaden; and on lovely summer nights I have sat "under the dreaming garden trees" at Baden-Baden listening to the incomparable music of the band of Strauss, delightfully fatigued after a ramble up the hills and about the ruins of the old Schloss where Eolian harps, artfully concealed in the ivy-covered window frames, were stirred by every passing breeze that came softly over the hills. The impression left on the mind after a visit to these familiar spots was one of luxurious feverishness, never of disgust. There was much there to allure; nothing, so far as I could see, to make one shudder. We did not mix in those days with rowdies, cheats, and blacklegs. may have been disputes at the tables-as there are in many a well-conducted club

There

from the heat of play, but there was no petty thieving, no grabbing of other people's money, no pot-house cavilling, such