once alone at Ramsgate, he saw one day a needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, seeming half distracted with some new misfortune, and he asked him the cause of such extraordinary grief. "As if I should tell you!" replied the lean-faced stranger, appearing to be stung with some unutterable disdain and anger. The other withdrew, but watched him, and again, after a short time, accosted him. "How foolish is it," he said, "my friend, not to tell me! Ease your mind; let me know what afflicts you." Then the poor creature, perhaps unaccustomed to such a tone of voice, told him that they were about to sell his very bed for rent, and drive out his wife and children. Tom pulled out half a sovereign. "What!" exclaimed the other, 'you don't mean, young man, that I'm to keep all this?" "Yes, but I do; so say no more about it, and go home." The "young man," as the poor one called him, never mentioned this circumstance; but after his death, a woman who had seen and heard what passed, related it. And mark too, that this was at a time when he used often to be reproved for not giving an account of what he did with his allowance, though he had but little besides the "pour" each time that he went any where, understanding by the term, however, something better than the word in chalk letters on the door of a lodging, for which ambassadors used formerly to contend*. Not a farthing was found in his purse when he died. The day of his death, almost in the agony, he asked the father who assisted him to give him a penny. It was given to him. He returned it back with his trembling hand, as much as to say, for the poor. The penny is kept. There is a thought in it. I wish those who hold it may profit by such a memento, as they ought. It is no wonder that the praise of this youth was on many tongues; and literally one might say, πολλοὶ δέ μιν ἐσθλὸν ἔειπον.

And now, my very wise and learned critic, do you maintain that such examples are too familiar, and that they are not worth mention? I dare say that some will be of that opinion; but they must allow me to think that it is such touches, given as it were on the spot, that make a picture living, and that they form an apt conclusion to this chapter, which shows the lessons of

*St.-Sim. Mém. ii. 186.

charity that are furnished by the young. O golden age of youth! age of charity! age therefore of perfection! may thy spirit be retained by all of us! Visible was it in this last instance, how, as an old author says, "thou enviedst no man's comforts, insultedst no man's opinions, blackenedst no man's character, devouredst no man's bread! Gently didst thou ramble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way; for each man's need thou hadst thy shilling,for each one's woe a tear."

CHAPTER X.

ELL, we have found a bower worthy of the name! What a delicious little garden once you are in it! Who could have thought it so pretty, passing outside the hedge along that dusty road! What green walks! With what an artistic eye to effect have the benches been placed! What parterres of flowers! What a concert of birds! Come now, scorner of Cockayne, never mind that pewter pot on the seat. What harm does it do you? suppose you would fret if you saw the way some grounds are ornamented, and scorn Milton for commending the

I

By the way, let me solemnly exhort you not to affect manhood so abominably by pretending to scorn pretty spots like this. "We have a liking for such things," says Leigh Hunt, speaking. of a certain sham castle in a garden. "We must own we cannot wish the tower down, now that it is up. It reminds us, if not of impregnable forts and enchanted castles, yet of the love of such things in imagination, of the books that speak of them, and of the intense delight we should have felt in being able to realize such an edifice for ourselves in childhood *." Does not even the severe and inflexible Ruskin say, "There is in garden de

*The Old Court Suburb.

coration some fitting admission of deceptive trickeries, as of pictured landscapes at the extremities of alleys and arcades,which things have sometimes a certain luxury and pleasurableness in places meant for idleness, and are innocent enough as long as they are regarded as mere toys *?" However, if you will look beyond the garden, here is the real horizon, such as it is, to content you, and it is only these poor tables and seats in the middle of the grass that recall suburban paradise. But, hurrah! there is another feature of resemblance that even you will highly approve of; for look! in the shady spot behind us there is actually a swing; so I suppose I must lay down my Virgil; but see first what I have just found in him:

"Stant et juniperi et castaneæ hirsutæ :

Strata jacent passim sua quæque sub arbore poma;

Omnia rident."

Well, after half an hour's swinging, and laughing, and bobbing around, we all sit down to continue our discussions, dissertations, essays, or what you like.

We must not delay longer without looking at the root from which so many beauteous blossoms grow. You know children are impatient, and will often disregard all consequences to satisfy their curiosity in examining into the principles of things. Let us imitate them in this respect, and pull up our little tree to see what has been hitherto covered up and hidden. Let us observe the lessons respecting faith, which can be learned in their bower. "The pagans," says St. Augustin, "can see the good works of Christians, but our sacraments are concealed from them. It is however what they do not see that produces what they do see †.”

The first lesson in this respect which is obtained in the Children's Bower, is that which teaches the infinite importance of possessing what elsewhere is often hardly remembered even by name, divine faith.

Natural religion, we must admit, or rather should love to remind one another, is a fact in the world not 'to be ignored in relation to children any more than to theologians. "Faith," says Gerson, "though supernatural, does not refute natural and

*The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

In Ps. ciii.

congruent reasons. "All physical science," observes a philosopher, "is in religious sentiments, and all religion in monuments of nature." Natural theology even, as another great modern writer says, rests on the same foundation upon which all the other sciences, as well as the practical conduct of all human affairs must for ever repose. "It is," as he continues to observe, "with natural religion as with many of the greatest blessings of our sublunary lot; they are so common, so habitually present and enjoyed by us, that we become insensible of their value, and only estimate them aright when we lose them or fancy them lost. Accustomed to handle the truths of Revelation in connexion with, and in addition to, those of natural theology, and never having experienced any state of mind in which we were without the latter, we forget how essential they are to the former. As we are wont to forget the existence of the air we constantly breathe, until put in mind of it by some violent change threatening suffocation, so it requires a violent fit of abstraction to figure to ourselves the state of our belief in Revelation, were the lights of natural religion withdrawn. But the existence and attributes of God are so familiarly proved by every thing around us, that we can hardly picture to ourselves the state of our belief in this great truth, if we only knew it by the testimony borne to miracles *." All this, no doubt, is true, though it will displease those timid, short-sighted contemporaries of ours, who of course know a great deal more of theology than Molina, Lessius, Vasquez, and Suarez, who never denied the natural order, or thought that humanity, with its gifts, its virtues, its merits, its vocation, and its whole order apart, did not continue under the supernatural order and Christianity; but still there remains the one great fact of all supreme importance, -the need and efficacy of divine faith, which is as much a gift as genius. There are in the very first elements of form two classes of curves, as a great author styles them, "the mortal and the immortal curves; the one having an appointed term of existence, the other absolutely incomprehensible and endless, only to be seen or grasped during a certain moment of their course. And it is found universally, that the class to which the human mind

* Lord Brougham, Nat. Theol. 134.

is attached for its chief enjoyment, are the endless or immortal lines." I don't want to forestall predictions, or to set up already for a prophet of domestic woes to any bower. But profound sorrow, in some shape or other, will come sooner or later to every one; and then, for your consolation, do not count on the mortal curves; "do not," as a French author says, "depend on nature, or on reason, or on men. Unless very singularly constituted, religion, positive religion, religion organized, involving divine faith, alone will be able to shed upon your wounds a healing and lasting balm; alone it will remain faithful to you when every thing else, strength, mental energy, speech itself, will have abandoned you; alone it will sweeten your tears; alone it will, with its material hand, make your strange bed; alone, in fine, it will sustain your soul. But if religion be to you a stranger; if you don't understand its language; if you do not know its heart of a mother; what can you expect from it?" The remark of a great author, that all the pleasure of the mediæval landscape was in stability, definiteness, and luminousness, while the moderns are expected in their landscapes to rejoice in darkness, and to triumph in mutability, may be extended to the whole mind of those who have faith, and of those who want it, while laying the foundation of happiness in things which momentarily change or fade, and expecting the utmost instruction from what it is impossible to arrest or to comprehend.

However, it is not for us to pretend to show the total insufficiency of natural theology as a guide to any portion of the human family, and the immeasurable distance which separates a mere intellectual conviction arising out of it from the prolific principle of divine faith. A celebrated historian, Augustus Thierry, has indicated it, saying to the Père Gratry, "I see by history the manifest necessity for a divine and visible authority to develop the life of the human race. All that is without Christianity counts for nothing; and all that is without the Church wants authority; therefore the Church is the authority which I seek, and to which I submit myself †." But we may ask leave with all the world to observe, that the root of what chiefly pre

* Gaume.

VOL. I.

Le Correspondant, tom. v. 404.

B.