trade, as we had done. Even his most potent excuse that “a boy must live somehow," Crossthwaite treated as contemptuously as if he had been a very Leonidas, while Mackaye chimed in with—

"An' ye a papist! ye talk o' praying to saints an' martyrs, that died in torments because they wad na do what they should na do? What ha' ye to do wi' martyrs?—a meeserable wretch that sells his soul for a mess o' pottage-four slices per diem o' thin bread and butter? Et propter veetam veevendi perdere causas! Dinna tell me o' your hardships-ye've had your deserts your rights were just equivalent to your mights, an' so ye got them.”

"Faix then, Misther Mackaye, darlint, an' whin did I desarve to pawn me own goose an' board, an' sit looking at the spidhers for the want o' them?"

"Pawn his ain goose? Pawn himsel'! pawn his needle-gin it had been worth the pawning, they'd ha' ta'en it. An' yet there's a command in Deuteronomy, Ye shall na tak' the millstone in pledge, for it's a man's life; nor yet keep his raiment owre night, but gie it the puir body back, that he may sleep in his ain claes, an' bless ye. O-but pawnbrokers dinna care for blessings-na marketable value in them, whatsoever."

6

"And the shopkeeper," said I, "in the Arabian Nights', refuses to take the fisherman's net in pledge, because he gets his living thereby."

"Ech! but, laddie, they were puir legal Jews, under carnal ordinances, an' daur na even tak an honest five

per cent. interest for their money. An' the baker o' Bagdad, why he was a benighted heathen, ye ken, an' deceivit by that fause prophet, Mahomet, to his eternal damnation, or he wad never ha' gone aboot to fancy a fisherman was his brither."

66

Faix, an' ain't we all brothers?" asked Kelly.

"Aye, and no," said Sandy, with an expression. which would have been a smile, but for its depth of bitter earnestness; "brethren in Christ, my laddie." "An' ain't that all over the same?"

"Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they'd say brothers, be sure; but because they don't mean brothers at a', they say brethren-ye'll mind, brethren-to soun' antiquate, an' professional, an' perfunctory-like, for fear it should be owre real, an' practical, an' startling, an' a' that; and then jist limit it down wi' a 'in Christ,' for fear o' owre wide applications, and a' that. But

'For a' that, an' a' that,

It's comin' yet for a' that,

When man an' man, the warld owre,

Shall brothers be, for a that

An' na brithren ony mair at a'!"

"An' didn't the blessed Jesus die for all?" "What? for heretics, Micky?"

"Bedad thin, an' I forgot that intirely!"

"Of course you did! It's strange, laddie," said he, turning to me, “that that Name suld be everywhere, fra the thunderers o' Exeter Ha' to this puir feckless Paddy, the watchword o' exclusiveness. I'm thinking ye'll no find the workmen believe in 't, till somebody

can fin' the plan o' making it the sign o' universal ccmprehension. Gin I had na seen in my youth that a brither in Christ meant less a thousandfold than a brither out o' him, I might ha' believit the noo-we'll no say what. I've an owre great organ o' marvellousness, an' o' veneration too, I'm afeard."

"Ah," said Crossthwaite, "you should come and hear Mr. Windrush to-night, about the all-embracing benevolence of the Deity, and the abomination of limiting it by all those narrow creeds and dogmas."

"An' wha's Meester Windrush, then?"

"Oh, he's an American; he was a Calvinist preacher originally, I believe; but, as he told us last Sunday evening, he soon cast away the worn-out vestures of an obsolete faith, which were fast becoming only crippling fetters."

"An' ran oot sarkless on the public, eh? I'm afeard there's mony a man else that throws awa' the gude auld plaid o' Scots Puritanism, an' is unco fain to cover his nakedness wi' ony cast popinjay's feathers he can forgather wi'. Aweel, aweel-a puir priestless age it is, the noo. We'll e'en gang hear him the nicht, Alton, laddie; ye ha' na darkened the kirk door this mony a day—nor I neither, mair by token."

It was too true. I had utterly given up the whole problem of religion as insoluble. I believed in poetry, science, and democracy-and they were enough for me then; enough, at least, to leave a mighty hunger in my heart, I knew not for what. And as for Mackaye, though brought up, as he told me, a rigid Scotch

Presbyterian, he had gradually ceased to attend the church of his fathers.

"It was no the kirk o' his fathers-the auld Godtrusting kirk that Clavers dragoonit down by burns and muirsides. It was a' gane dead an' dry; a piece of AuldBailey barristration anent soul-saving dodges. What did he want wi' proofs o' the being o' God, an' o' the doctrine o' original sin? He could see eneugh o' them ayont the shop-door, ony tide. They made puir Rabbie Burns an anything-arian, wi' their blethers, an' he was near gaun the same gate."

And, besides, he absolutely refused to enter any place of worship where there were pews.

"He

wad na follow after a multitude to do evil; he wad na gang before his Maker wi' a lee in his right hand. Nae wonder folks were so afraid o' the names o' equality an' britherhood, when they'd kicked them out e'en o' the kirk o' God. Pious folks may ca' me a sinfu' auld Atheist. They winna gang to a harmless stage-play -an' richt they for fear o' countenancing the sin that's dune there; an' I winna gang to the kirk, for fear o' countenancing the sin that's dune there, by putting down my hurdies on that stool o' antichrist, a haspit pew!"

I was, therefore, altogether surprised at the promptitude with which he agreed to go and hear Crossthwaite's new-found prophet. His reasons for so doing may be, I think, gathered from the conversation towards the end of this chapter.

Well, we went; and I, for my part, was charmed

with Mr. Windrush's eloquence. His style, which was altogether Emersonian, quite astonished me by its alternate bursts of what I considered brilliant declamation, and of forcible epigrammatic antithesis. I do not deny that I was a little startled by some of his doctrines, and suspected that he had not seen much, either of St. Giles's cellar or tailors' workshops either, when he talked of sin as "only a lower form of good. Nothing," he informed us, "was produced in nature without pain and disturbance; and what we had been taught to call sin, was, in fact, nothing but the birth-throes attendant on the progress of the species.-As for the devil, Novalis, indeed, had gone so far as to suspect him to be a necessary illusion. Novalis was a mystic, and tainted by the old creeds. The illusion was not necessary-it was disappearing before the fast-approaching meridian light of philosophic religion. Like the myths of Christianity, it had grown up in an age of superstition, when men, blind to the wondrous order of the universe, believed that supernatural beings, like the Homeric gods, actually interfered in the affairs of mortals. Science had revealed the irrevocability of the laws of nature—was man alone to be exempt from them? No. The time would come, when it would be as obsolete an absurdity to talk of the temptation of a fiend, as it was now to talk of the weir-wolf, or the angel of the thundercloud. The metaphor might remain, doubtless, as a metaphor, in the domain of poetry, whose office was to realize, in objective symbols, the subjective ideas of the human intellect; but philosophy, and the pure sentiment