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A NOVEL.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. III.

LONDON:

HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET

1829.

UNIT. OF MINNESOTA LIBRARY

WALDEGRAVE.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Yet so much bounty is in God, such grace,
That who advance his glory, not their own,
Them he himself to glory will advance.-MILTON.

WITHOUT again adverting to his own disappointment, Lord Egmont proposed that, as Lord St. Aubrey would of course expect an answer to the important question of the marriage, he himself should call upon his haughty friend, and with all due expressions of gratitude and regret decline the intended honour.

"Oh, Edith! how blest we might have been,"

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thought Waldegrave, as he parted from his father; "with the unchanging kindness of such a father to greet us, ours had been a lot to turn this dreary earth into a heaven.”

On the evening of this day, Waldegrave, having related to Edgar all that had passed between his father and himself, resumed the reading of Paley's "Evidences."

In the manly, unadorned arguments of that invaluable work, where the author appears as free from prejudice as desirous to give full weight to every objection which might be offered to his strong reasoning, Waldegrave found a mass of evidence in support of the truth of Christianity, the very existence of which he would have doubted some few hours earlier.

Having finished Paley's "Evidences," he afterwards applied to the Bible, out of which he selected for his present study the Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Prophecies. The impression produced by a perusal of these writings was, that their authors had put

on record a series of facts which really happened; that they were the companions and followers of Christ, eye-witnesses of what they related, and guileless and zealous at least if deceived. Consequently, was Jesus an impostor or an enthusiast? Could an enthusiast have possessed those calm powers of reasoning, and have laid down a code of morality so free from the wild effusions of a tête exaltée? Could an enthusiast have performed miracles in the presence of mixed multitudes? If the healing of the blind and lame was not performed with the divine aid, could it have been effected without: collusion; and, as it was performed at all times, and on many patients, could the widely-shared secret have been inviolably preserved ?. Yet what might not be imposed on a credulous multitude by a designing and sagacious spirit, confident in its own superiority? thought Waldegrave. But as he dwelt on the beautiful doctrines, whose perfect morality, astonishing as

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