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 does not prevent sincere Catholics from court had established the faith, had ex- taking an honorable place among men of cluded heresy, had finally confirmed the science-but they do so at their peril; power of the sovereign pontiff, and had though less terrible than of old, the Index kept the initiation of all future reforms, and Inquisition still survive, and the cenand the control of all ecclesiastical poli- sures of the Church are not obsolete, tics for the future, entirely in its own though her last offices are more frequently power- a useful but not a glorious vic- rejected than withheld. By her attitude tory, gained by the persistent character of in the Council of Trent, the Church of the Roman curia under the guidance of its Rome left to Protestants and unbelievers new servants and rulers, the Company of the task of extending human knowledge Jesus. 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.

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

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.

last, but more erect and with a better color.

She was sitting where he had seen her | You are slow enough in some things, but not slow enough for a Dobbin. Those great flat feet of his, too! No, I think my name is best. So good-bye, John Faithful, — best of Johns."

"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?"

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, John-yours and mine-as if we had killed him!" she exclaimed, turning round to him.

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.

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 an humble friend, but not quite so humble as that! What man, to call a man, ever was, or would be?

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.

That unaccountable piece of mechanism we call the mind is oddly erratic in its behavior, however. We imagine that we "Good-bye, John, my dear, good John are conducting it in one direction, handles, -John Faithful!" she said affection-footrests, everything well under our con

trol, 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,

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 "As often as not she talks Cathers,

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 awful state. across that gray plain which has been as if he were alive, you knowwritten over in its time with so many un-I mean. It makes a fellow feel deuced fulfilled hopes. He could not help feeling jumpy, I can tell you! Wanders about as if there was something odd, something the house, in and out of the rooms, sitting 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.

After every such fit of consolation he would as inevitably begin again. Had they been a hundred miles apart, the sense of banishment would have been infinitely less. But to be so near, to be able almost from his window to see the woods in which lay the house that sheltered her, to be within reach of her hand, yet never by any accident to touch it! She must know that he was there, must know therefore that he would be waiting for some signal. Had the hours, days, weeks they had shared left no legacy behind them? Worse, had they left only a legacy of discomfort? Was his image so mixed up with all that had been painfullest in her life that it could never get clear again; but must remain forever scarred with it, like those letters which we keep

about on steps and in the stables amongst the horses, as if she were trying to find something. My mother says she oughtn'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."

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

"Of course. She won't let you pity her, though; not a bit of it!-flares up like a bonfire if one says that the poor thing has softening of the brain -as if any one couldn't see it with half an eye! As to not having her to live with her alwayswhy, I believe she'd knock any of us down if we were to hint at such a thing. I know I wouldn't dare do it. Yet how the deuce is it to go on, you know? Eleanor can't live with that poor thing hanging on to her always, it would be enough to send her out of her own wits! It would me, I know, I should be seeing blue devils and black bogies in no time if I were to stay there. You might as easily try though to kick this house into the seaa lot easier, if it comes to that as argue with her when she's made up her mind.

little fellow in at once," he answered has-larly amiable feelings towards Algernon tily. Cathers. He was too eager now about an answer to perceive more than a momentary prick.

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.

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. His lungs are delicate."

"If you are sure Lady Eleanor would not think it too soon; if you think I might venture?" he said hesitatingly. "I have kept away, not liking to intrude. I heard that her own relations were there, and that therefore she probably Still, perhaps now

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.

66

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 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.

"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."

At another moment John Lawrence's conscience would have responded to the unintended probe, he not being conscious at any period of having nourished particu

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 beeches sweeping their light green trains far over the darker grass. The full flowing river, too deep to make much noise, rolled sleepily along, shooting arrowy