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spatched; and on the 4th of December, | is hampered by her past declarations, and 1563, the decrees of the council were is not free to accept conclusions which signed by two hundred and thirty-four may contradict them. This, it is true, prelates present at Trent. The papal court had established the faith, had excluded heresy, had finally confirmed the power of the sovereign pontiff, and had kept the initiation of all future reforms, and the control of all ecclesiastical politics for the future, entirely in its own power- -a useful but not a glorious victory, gained by the persistent character of the Roman curia under the guidance of its new servants and rulers, the Company of Jesus.

The Council of Trent established the principle of Ultramontanism, which in detail is clericalism. Doctrine, hierarchy, and discipline were fixed; room for development being left in one direction only, that of the exaltation of the papacy. In the Middle Ages, not only religion, but the science and the literature of the world, were in the hands of the clergy. The schoolmen did not fight against science, but met as true enquirers the questions which presented themselves to their minds. The giants against whom they waged war were erroneous or rebellious systems of thought or morals. The heresies of the Middle Ages were bred of ignorance, not of knowledge. But by the Council of Trent Rome committed herself to a struggle with truth, in which she is certain to be defeated at last. The principle of free thought is opposed to dogmatism, not to religion. The Church does not always condemn a novelty- it prohibits and frowns upon research, basing its reasoning still upon the a priori method; but as science establishes one truth after another, it recedes from the position occupied hitherto, and takes up a similar position in another part of the line. Macaulay's proposition about transubstantiation is not a complete instance of the Roman method. There Rome is dealing with the terms of a formal philosophy; with metaphysics, not with science. Science, as it exists at present, knows nothing of the ultimate natures of things. Substance and accident are words, not realities; and the whole controversy may be laid on the shelf, with so many others which have perplexed mankind and are now forgotten. But when the Church of Rome, speaking- whether ex cathedra or not through the congregation of the Index condemns "the false Pythagorean doctrine" that the earth goes round the sun, she assumes an attitude which is that of despair, not of authority; for she

does not prevent sincere Catholics from taking an honorable place among men of science but they do so at their peril; though less terrible than of old, the Index and Inquisition still survive, and the censures of the Church are not obsolete, though her last offices are more frequently rejected than withheld. By her attitude in the Council of Trent, the Church of Rome left to Protestants and unbelievers the task of extending human knowledge in which she had borne so noble a part; thenceforward she was bound to follow, and to follow unwillingly, not to lead mankind in the pursuit of knowledge; discipline and authority, not freedom and truth, are thenceforward her watchwords; and now that she has lost the support of the secular arm, she yields more and more to the temptation of temporizing with error, and seeking how to avoid censuring methods of thought and inquiry which she cannot altogether bless. That she holds her own with so few signs of decrepitude is also due to the Council of Trent, out of which she emerged purified from scandals; to the learning and discipline of her seminaries, also a growth of that period; to the blameless lives of her pontiffs and clergy for three hundred years, to the charity and courage of her missionaries and her religious, both male and female; and to the tradition of piety which never shone more brightly than in an age when her doctrines are discredited.

From Murray's Magazine. MAJOR LAWRENCE, F.L.S.

BY THE HON. EMILY LAWLESS. AUTHOR OF "HURRISH, A STUDY," ETC. Book VI. -THE CURTAIN FALLS.

CHAPTER V.

HIS duties as escort done, John Lawrence went back to his own cottage. He did not even wait for the funeral. There were plenty of other people to stand around Algernon Cathers's grave. Lord Helversdale had arrived, also other relations and connections down to the remotest of kin, all eager to take their part. He had done his. If further service lay in the future, it was not yet due.

He remained in that briny retreat for nearly a week, then one day walked over the ridge to see Lady Mordaunt.

She was sitting where he had seen her | You are slow enough in some things, but

last, but more erect and with a better color.

"Well, John! Well, John!" she said as he entered the room. Then after a moment, "So, it is over!" "Yes, it is all over," he answered, sitting down beside her.

"Poor fellow! One must say poor fellow now-mustn't one? It doesn't seem ten minutes since we were talking of him last, does it?"

Those

not slow enough for a Dobbin.
great flat feet of his, too! No, I think my
name is best. So good-bye, John Faith-
ful,- best of Johns.'

He smiled rather grimly several times that afternoon as he thought of her words. They were kindly said, and kindly meant too, yet there was a sharp sub-flavor about them, as there was apt to be about Lady Mordaunt's sayings. They suggested to his mind a very humble friend indeed, one of those spaniel-like creatures who require absolutely no return for their devotion, who are content to live all their lives upon broken meats and half-hearted pats, which more spirited animals decline. He was we had killed him!" she exclaimed, turn-an humble friend, but not quite so humble ing round to him. as that! What man, to call a man, ever was, or would be?

He nodded, and she was silent too a while. Suddenly a spark of the old whimsical light came into her eyes. "Do you know I can't help feeling as if it was all our doing, Johnyours and mine - as if

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He winced. "Don't say that!" he said in a tone of discomfort. Then, "I have felt so myself a dozen times," he added.

She asked about their life at Lugliano; about the closing scenes; about poor Mrs. Cathers. Her granddaughter, she said, was coming over some day soon, but had not left the house yet. They talked, but their talk refused to flow into its usual easy channel; a sort of embargo lay upon both; to put what they were mutually feeling into words would have been an indecorum, and they were too intimate to fill up the gap with platitudes. What there was to say they would not say, and anything else seemed a mere futility.

He got up therefore before long. She did not as usual oppose his intention, but rose too, and walked with him to the end of the room.

"Come and see me soon again," she said, as she held out her hand. "We shall be more at our ease then. Our guilt, if we are guilty, will have grown older, or like other criminals we shall have learnt to hear it mentioned without wincing." She retained her hold upon his hand, as if reluctant, in spite of her own words, to let him leave her.

"Good-bye, John, my dear, good John -John Faithful!" she said affectionately.

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"Why do you call me that?" he asked quickly.

"Do you mind? Does it hurt you? Don't you think it is a good name? It seems to me a very good one. If everybody was called by an appropriate name, as in an old-fashioned novel, that, I feel sure, would be yours."

"Wouldn't Dobbin be better?" he enquired irritably.

"Dobbin? Would it? I think not! LIVING AGE. VOL. LX. 3102

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He persuaded himself that he was a remarkably busy in fact, rather overworked-man, during the week or two that followed his return from Lugliano. He really had a good deal to do, if not quite as much as he imagined. Even the smallest of landed properties claims a certain amount of care, and it cannot be said that the little peninsula of Coltshead had hitherto enjoyed much at the hands of its owner. There was the roof of the house, which had given way in half-a-dozen places; fences to be mended and re-made; a boundary line across the neck of land, which was being invaded by an ambitious farmer, whose encroachments must be summarily curtailed; a footpath which serpentined down the face of the cliff, which the sea in a fit of ill-temper had all but snatched away the previous autumn; seats to repair-many important details, in short, to be seen to- all laudable and even essential preoccupations, quite enough to engross any reasonable man's time and attention.

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That unaccountable piece of mechanism we call the mind is oddly erratic in its behavior, however. We imagine that we are conducting it in one direction, handles, footrests, everything well under our control, discreetly we jog along the highroad in the soberest sort of progression, a kind of farmer's trot to market. A moment's relaxation a glance aside - and lo! we find that the wretched thing has snatched away the control, and is hurrying us, who can say where? over hedges and ditches, to realms which a moment before we had no more intention of visiting than the topmost peak of Teneriffe, or the capital of the Great Mogul.

So it was with our prudent friend. He,

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One visitor from Redcombe did appear at the end of a fortnight. Young Mordaunt, who had been spending a week with his sister, looked in one afternoon at Coltshead on his way to the station. He gave a pitiable account of poor Mrs. Cathers. She wouldn't keep her room, he said, and did not seem ill, indeed the doctor said there was nothing actually amiss with her, but her mind was in an awful state.

too, found that his mind had a tendency | but hate to touch - dried nettles, emblems to stray into unauthorized regions, to only of bitterness and unforgotten stings? conjure up pictures, evoke possibilities, If that were the case, then indeed the which had could not, he told himself, harshness of fate would have no further have any shadow of justification. He unkindness left to bestow upon him. was out of humor, restless, filled with vague longings which tingled and worried like some uncontrollable nervous disorder. He would go out with a great show of determination, full of some order he was about to give his workmen; then, before he reached the place, discover that there was no really particular hurry, and would turn away, saunter down to the shore, and stand, for hours at a time, upon one of the big weed-fringed rocks, gazing seaward across that gray plain which has been written over in its time with so many unfulfilled hopes. He could not help feeling as if there was something odd, something almost sinister in the silence which had settled down between him and the dwellers at Redcombe. Why did no one write, no one take the smallest notice of him? A sense of grievance the more acute for being unacknowledged -began to grow up. He could be of no more use, and therefore, like other things which serve their turn and are done with, a time came when he must inevitably be discarded. He knew that this was not the case, still he took a malicious pleasure in telling himself that it was, in putting the situation as brutally as it admitted of. It is one of the many small devices we humans are given to. When we have pushed our punishment to the furthest acme of discomfort, we know that we insensibly relax. We assure ourselves that matters are not really so bad as all that, that there are alleviations we had not previously thought of; and so by degrees we grow soothed by our own kindness.

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"As often as not she talks as if he were alive, you know-Cathers, I mean. It makes a fellow feel deuced jumpy, I can tell you! Wanders about the house, in and out of the rooms, sitting about on steps and in the stables amongst the horses, as if she were trying to find something. My mother says she oughta't to be let prowl the way she does, but Eleanor won't hear of hindering her. The only person she seems to notice is the little chap-Algy, you know. She likes to have him with her, and talks to him by the hour of what he is to do when he grows up, and all sorts of stuff the child, of course, don't understand. Half the time I believe she thinks it's the other one-his father, I mean. She drives about the country with him and the nurse opposite, and when people look up and bow, smiles and nods as proud as Punch, as if she hadn't a care in the world, and then begins to sob and cry. It's awful, quite awful, to see her, like having a sort of banshee about the place.'

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"Poor soul!" the colonel said pityingly. "It must be terribly hard upon your sister," he added.

After every such fit of consolation he "Of course. She won't let you pity her, would as inevitably begin again. Had though; not a bit of it!-flares up like a they been a hundred miles apart, the bonfire if one says that the poor thing has sense of banishment would have been in- softening of the brain- as if any one finitely less. But to be so near, to be couldn't see it with half an eye! As to able almost from his window to see the not having her to live with her always— woods in which lay the house that shel- why, I believe she'd knock any of us down tered her, to be within reach of her hand, if we were to hint at such a thing. I yet never by any accident to touch it! know I wouldn't dare do it. Yet how the She must know that he was there, must deuce is it to go on, you know? Eleanor know therefore that he would be waiting can't live with that poor thing hanging for some signal. Had the hours, days, on to her always, it would be enough to weeks they had shared left no legacy be- send her out of her own wits! It would hind them? Worse, had they left only a me, I know, I should be seeing blue devils legacy of discomfort? Was his image so and black bogies in no time if I were to mixed up with all that had been painfullest stay there. You might as easily try in her life that it could never get clear though to kick this house into the seaagain; but must remain forever scarred a lot easier, if it comes to that as argue with it, like those letters which we keep | with her when she's made up her mind.

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If that poor thing was her mother twenty times over she couldn't seem fonder of her, or put herself about more has her with her whenever she'll stay, and sleeps in a poky little dressing-room next door to her, so as to hear her in a moment if she stirs and wants anything. It's awfully silly, you know, perfectly nonsensical. Still, she's a trump, Eleanor is, there's no denying that!" her brother ended with rather unbrotherly fervor.

As far as astonishment aliowed him he welcomed her cordially, and invited her to enter. She accepted, but mechanically, and almost with the air of a somnambulist. Puzzled and pitying he led the way to the sitting-room, which was a few steps away, and she followed. The poor thing was dressed in some elaborate combina tion of crape and cloth, cut in a peculiar fashion, and trailing behind her like a court train. It seemed to have been cop. The colonel agreed with him. His ied from something-something that it guest departed, he sat a long time doing imperfectly resembled. She had grown nothing. A sort of aerial map had grown thinner, and, like all elderly people to up before him, the map of her future. whom that happens, seemed also to have Bits of it were quite clear, but there were grown suddenly much older. A number others which refused to fit, and which he of fine, hitherto invisible wrinkles crossed found himself staring at in a fruitless and recrossed her forehead and the neigheffort to fill up the void. His own part in | borhood of her mouth; her always promithe matter, he told himself, he did not nent eyes had a dull, glassy look, and a think of. What part in fact had he? Of | faint, fixed smile, which seemed ever on this, the reader may discount as much as the point of dissolving into tears, quiv. he pleases. It was his fingers, at any ered upon her lips. rate, that fitted the bits into their places. Three weeks after this he had another visitor. He was sitting in his study, sorting old papers, a motley heap which had been long accumulating, family papers, official papers, half-forgotten zoological memoranda of all sorts. The morning had been showery, and showery fringes. still shaded the horizon, but here and there the sun struck clearly upon the sea. Half-a-dozen miles away it shone upon one specially luminous patch, in the centre of which the small triangular sail of a fishing-smack, which happened to be passing, caught and glittered like a broken three

pence.

He was about to take up the pen which he had momentarily laid aside, when to his surprise a sound of wheels made itself audible where no vehicle above the social calibre of a wheelbarrow ordinarily attempted to pass, and the next moment the door-bell clanged shrilly.

He waited a minute, then went himself to open it, concluding that the pensioner and his wife were- as was not infrequently the case-out of the way. His previous surprise turned to stupefaction when he found Mrs. Cathers standing upon the doorstep; a large open carriage, the same that he remembered her driving about in formerly, behind; a footman, solemn in a suit of ponderous black, holding the door in his hand, while a nurse and child looked on from the cushions. How that heavy vehicle had made its way along the narrow approach, rough with stones and heavy with sand, was a mystery, but there unmistakably it was.

She sat down in the chair he offered her, and gazed round with an air of bewildement, as if uncertain where she was or what agency had brought her there.

"I wasn't ever here before, was I?" she said at last, looking up at him with an air of childlike docility.

"I

"I think not," he answered gently. don't remember your ever paying me a visit in old days. I have been to your house, though, many times, as I dare say you remember."

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She did not answer, but looked round again and then out at the great shining plain below. Algernon did not like the sea," she said dreamily; "he liked parks, and gardens, and houses, and birds birds to shoot. He was a wonderful shot, my son Algernon."

The colonel did not in the least know what to say. How far did the poor thing remember what had taken place or not? he wondered. There was no particular grief in her tone, only a sort of vaguely plaintive reminiscence.

There came again a little scud of rain, which was carried by the wind against the glass. Mrs. Cathers looked at it for a moment, and then back at him with an air of anxiety.

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Algernon ought to come in, oughtn't he?" she said enquiringly. Her hearer started. Had the poor thing's wits really departed altogether then? Did she imagine that her son was out somewhere in the rain? A moment afterwards he remembered that the child bore the same name.

"Of course. I will go and bring the

little fellow in at once," he answered hastily.

She waited while he went to the front door, and a minute afterwards reappeared escorting in the nurse and child. The little boy was swathed in black from head to foot, which suited him as a coating of soot and ashes suits a spring flower. He was a pretty, rosy little creature, as unlike Jan as one child could be unlike ananother - fresh, fair, and chubby, with rounded cheeks, round dewy lips, and a pair of round blue eyes which gazed at everything with an impartial air of baby acquisitiveness.

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His grandmother drew him up towards her, feeling anxiously over his clothes to ascertain whether he was wet. The little boy submitted resignedly, stretching out his hand at the same time to seize a brightly colored pink shell which happened to be lying near the edge of the table.

"Algernon mustn't get wet," she murmured to herself. "He gets cold easily.

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She continued to look at him with the same puzzled expression, a wavering smile playing over her lips; then, without answering, turned away and looked across the room at the little boy, who had just succeeded in dislodging a dead crab from the aquarium, and was trying how far its legs could be induced to come apart without actually breaking in two.

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Algernon would like it," she said in the same distant, dreamy tone. "It would be good for Algernon. Do come." Very well, I will," he answered. Lady Eleanor, it was but too clear, had His lungs are delicate." nothing to say to the invitation, which Involuntarily John Lawrence looked at had plainly emanated only from the poor the nurse to see if she corroborated this thing's own wandering brain. He declined statement. She shook her head emphat- to realize this fact to himself, however. ically and indignantly, but made no more When a man is very hungry he is apt not audible denial. Evidently the household to be fastidiously punctilious; a mere acwas drilled not to oppose their late mas-cidental beckon suffices. ter's mother in anything.

Still keeping the pink shell in his fat grasp, the little boy slid away from his grandmother's detaining hand, and trotted across the room, attracted by the sight of the aquarium, a remnant of John's former zoologic apparatus. Mrs. Cathers got up too, and presently drifted towards the door, less like a visitor departing than like some one going out of her own room into another close at hand.

Near it she stopped, however, and looked back with an air of perplexity. "You'll come soon, won't you?" she said gently.

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"Come to Redcombe, do you mean?" he asked eagerly. "Did your -did Lady ? Eleanor ask you to invite me She continued to look back with a slight frown of perplexity. It seemed as if she were trying to catch some floating idea, the threads of which perpetually evaded her.

"You and Algernon were friends," she said dreamily. "You were so kind to him when he was a little boy."

CHAPTER VI.

The

HE went three days later. It had rained with hardly a break since poor Mrs. Cathers's strange visit, but was now dazzlingly fine. The breath of the Atlantic touched the cheek with a touch like velvet. ditches were full of crimson loosestrife, the fields of ox-eyed daisies, the sky of great balloon-like clouds, racing along one after the other as if in an aerial regatta.

John Lawrence swung along the four or five miles of road until he reached the Redcombe lodge, a flower-mantled affair, all balconies and carved verandahs, like a bijou villa. A woman in a black and white cap came to see who the visitor was, and stared suspiciously at the stran ger, but in the end decided to let him pass.

Unlike most places revisited after a lapse of time, it seemed to him to have grown larger in the interval, statelier too, and better altogether. The trees were splendid; straight-trunked, symmetrical, feathered down to the very ground, the At another moment John Lawrence's beeches sweeping their light green trains conscience would have responded to the far over the darker grass. The full flowunintended probe, he not being consciousing river, too deep to make much noise, at any period of having nourished particu- rolled sleepily along, shooting arrowy

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