the various songs of the birds-the throstles, the chaffinches, the blackbirds, or the nightingales. God, he said, had filled the woods with throngs of sacred carollers, and melodious troubadours, and merry minstrels; some with one sweet monotonous cadence, one bell-like note, one happy little peep' or chirp, and no more, and others overflowing with a passion of intricate and endless varied song; and it was a churlish return for such a concert not to give heed enough to learn one song from another. Or, together, we would watch the rooks in the great elm grove behind the house, how strict their laws of property were, the old birds claiming the same nest every year, and the young ones having to construct new ones. Or he would tell us of the different forms of government among the various creatures: how the bees had an hereditary monarchy, yet owned no aristocracy but that of labour, killing their drones before winter, that if any would not work neither should he eat; and how the rooks held parliaments. Everywhere he made us see, wonderfully blended and balanced, fixed order, with free, spontaneous action; freaks of sportive merriment, free as the wildest play of childhood, with a fixedness of law more exact than the nicest calculations of the mathematician; 'service which is perfect freedom;' delicate beauty with homely utility; lavish abundance with provident care. And everywhere he made us feel that the spring of all this order, the source of all this fulness, the smile through all this humour and play of nature, the soul of all this law, was none other than God. So that often after these morning walks with him we fell into an awed silence, feeling the warm daylight solemn as a starry midnight, with the Great Presence; and entered the church-porch almost with the feeling that we were rather stepping out of the temple than into it; that, sacred as was the place of worship and of the dead, it was not more sacred or awful than the world of life we left to enter it.

The golden hour of our golden day (for Sunday was ever that to us), was when, in the evening, he read the Bible with Roger and me in his own room. I cannot remember much that he used to say about it. I only remember how he made us reverence and love it; its fragments of biography which make you know the people better than volumes of narrative; its characters that are never mere incarnations of principles, but men and women; its letters that are never mere sermons concentrated on an individual; its sermons that are never mere dissertations, peculiarly applicable to no one time or place, but speeches intensely directed to the needs of one audience, and the circumstances of one place, and therefore containing guiding wisdom for all; its prayers that are never sermons from a pulpit, but brief cries of entreaty from the dust, or flaming torrents of adoration piercing beyond the stars, or quiet asking of little children for daily bread; its confessions that are great drops of blood wrung slowly from the agony of the heart; its hymns that dart upward, singing and soaring in a wild passion of praise and joy.

After this learning and repeating our chapters from the Bible, while my father and my aunts were going about the cottages and villages near us on various errands of mercy, Roger and I had a free Vol. 10.-No. 37.

F

hour or two, during which we commonly resorted in summer to our perch on the apple tree, and in winter to the chamber over the porch where the dried herbs were kept, where we held our weekly convocation as to all matter that came under our cognisance, domestic, personal, ecclesiastical, or political. Placidia was not excluded, but being four years older, she preferred her book' and the society of our aunts. Then came the sacred hour with our father in his own chamber. Afterwards, in winter, we often gathered round the fire in the great hall, we in the chimney nook, and the men and maidens in an outer circle, while my father told stories of the sufferings of holy men and women for conscience sake, or while Dr. Antony (when he was visiting us) narrated his interviews with those who were languishing for truth or for liberty in various prisons throughout the realm.

And so the night came, always, it seemed to us, sooner than any other day. Although never until our visit at Davenant Hall did I understand the unspeakable blessing of that weekly closing of the doors on Time, and opening all the windows of the soul towards Eternity; the unspeakable lowering and narrowing of the whole being which follows on its neglect and loss. To us the Lord's Day was a day of Paradise; but I believe the barest Sabbath that was ever fenced round with prohibitions by the most rigid Puritanism, looking rather to the fence than the enclosure, rather to what is shut out than to what is cultivated within, is a boon and a blessing compared with the life without pauses, without any consecrated house for the soul built out of Time, without silences within to listen to the Voice that is heard best in silence.

It was a point of honour and a badge of loyalty with many of the Cavaliers to protest practically against the Puritan observance of the Sabbath. The Lady Lucy, indeed, welcomed the sacred day, as she did everything else that was sacred and heavenly. She sang to her lute a lovely song in praise of the day from the new Divine Poems' of Mr. George Herbert, and told me how he had sung it to his lute on his death-bed only a few years before, in 1632.

On Sunday heaven's gates stand ope,

she sang; and I am sure they stood ever open to her.

But the rest of the family, while reverencing her devout and charitable life, seemed to have no more thought of following it than if she had been a nun in a convent. Indeed, in a sense, she did dwell apart, cloistered in a hallowed atmosphere of her own.

Her husband and her sons requested her prayers when they went on any expedition of danger, as their ancestors must have sought for the intercessions of the priest or canonised saint. The heavier oaths, except under strong provocation, were dropped (by instinct rather than by intention) in her presence; and mild adjurations, as by heathen gods or goddesses, or by a lover's troth, or by a Cavalier's honour, substituted for them. They would listen fondly as she sang 'divine poems' to her lute, and declared she had the sweetest warbling voice and the prettiest hands in His Majesty's three kingdoms. But it never seemed to occur to them that her piety

was any condemnation or any rule to them. Indeed, she had so many minute laws and ceremonies that, easily as they suited her, it would have been difficult to fit them into any but a lady's life of leisure. She had special prayers and hymns for nine o'clock, midday, three o'clock, six o'clock. And once awaking in the night, I heard sounds like those of her lute stealing from the window of the little oratory next her chamber. She had what seemed to me countless distinctions of days and seasons, marked by the things she ate or did not eat, which she observed as strictly as Aunt Dorothy her prohibitions as to not wearing things. Only in one thing Lady Lucy was happier than Aunt Dorothy; for whilst Aunt Dorothy fondly wished for a book of Leviticus in the New Testament, and could not find it, Lady Lucy had her book of Leviticus-not indeed exactly in the New Testament, but solemnly sanctioned by the authority of Archbishop Laud.

A complex framework to adapt to the endless varieties and inexorable necessities of any man's life, rich or poor, in court, or camp, or city; or indeed of any woman's, unless provided with waiting gentlewomen.

In fact, the Lady Lucy herself sometimes spoke with wistful looks and sighs of Mr. Farrar's Sacred College at Little Gidding (not far from us), between Huntingdon and Cambridge, where the voice of prayer never ceased day nor night, and the psalter was chanted through in a rotatory manner by successive worshippers once in every four-and-twenty hours.

Sir Walter and her sons never attempted to imitate her. She floated in their imagination, in a land of clouds between earth and heaven. Her religion had a dainty sweetness and solemn grace about it most becoming, they considered, to a noble lady; but for men, except for a few clergymen, as inapplicable as Archbishop Laud's priestly vestments for the street or the battle-field.

In our Puritan homes there was altogether another stamp of religion. Whatever it might lack in grace and taste, it was a religion for men as much as for women, a religion for the camp as much as the oratory. Rough it might be often, and stern. It was never feeble. It had no two standards of holiness for clergy and laity, men and women. All men and women, we were taught, were called to love God with the whole heart; to serve Him at all times. If we obeyed, we were still (in our sinfulness) ever doing less than duty. If we disobeyed, we were in revolt against the King of heaven. There were no neutrals in that war, no reserves in that disobedience.

And unhappily the Lady Lucy's family, in surrendering any hope of reaching her eminence of piety, surrendered more. For it is not elevating, it is lowering, to have constantly before us an image of holiness which we admire but do not imitate.

In the morning the household met in the family-chapel (the parish-church being for the present avoided until danger of the infectious sickness was over). In the afternoon, Sir Walter and his sons loyally played at tennis and bowls with the young men of the household. And in the evening there was a dance in the hall, in which all joined.

The merriment was loud, and reached Lettice and me where we sat with the Lady Lucy and her lute.

Yet now and then one of the boys would come in and complain of the tedium of the day. It was such an interruption, they said, to the employments of the week, and just at the best season in the year for hunting, and with their father's hounds in perfect condition and training. Tennis, they said, was all very well for boys, and morris-dancing for girls, but there was no real sport in such things after all, except to fill up an idle hour or two. The next day there was to be a rare bear-baiting at Huntingdon, and the day after a cock-fight in the next village. And at the beginning of the following week Sir Walter had promised to give them a bull to be baited. And the Book of Sports,' in their opinion, let the Puritans say what they like, was too rigid by half in prohibiting such true old English sports on Sundays.

The Lady Lucy said a few pitiful tender words on behalf of Sir Walter's bull, which was listened to without the slightest disrespect, or the slightest change of mind-kissing her hand, and laughingly vowing she was too tender and sweet for this world at all, and that if she had had the making of it she would certainly have left bears and bulls altogether out of the creation.

It was without doubt a long and dreary Sunday to Roger and me. It would naturally have been long and melancholy anywhere without our father.-The Draytons and the Davenants: a Story of the Civil Wars.

ON THE GOOD EFFECTED BY PREACHING.

OUR recompense is always greater than our trouble, even when the duties of the pulpit are so understood that they occupy every moment, that they invade the whole life. That of which beginners who are threatened by discouragement, and veterans in whom lassitude commences, cannot too thoroughly persuade themselves, is that preachers do not know the use they are to society, to their country, to the Church, to individual progress, to the peace of families, in the support of the weak, in the consolation of the afflicted. Yes, I am strongly convinced that we have no idea either of the evil that is prevented, or of the good that is done; by a thousand signs, small and great, we may recognise it by almost daily proofs. If our lips were not closed, if our pens were not broken, and were it not for a feeling of the sacred duty of an inviolable silence which alone renders our ministry possible (not to speak of our ordination vow), if we might publish the confidences which our sermons induce, their fruits of social and religious usefulness would astonish the most incredulous. Yet after all, is there room to be very much surprised at this, and are not these effects of our exhortations explained by the very nature of the human heart? It would be strange if this incessant action of the religious mind upon the public mind were fruitless. Our sermons keep the Gospel present to the mind of the world, and compel it to think of it; they render

forgetfulness of it impossible, and in these three last centuries especially, preaching has rediscovered its purity in founding faith upon the basis of freedom of inquiry. I know that it will be easy for sceptics, for worldlings, for scoffers, to turn these assertions into ridicule, and to reproach us with being judges in our own cause, of striking with our own hands a medal in our own honour, without daring to show the reverse side. But I know that in the course of a long ministry, unmistakable proofs of these assertions abound, and that from so many communications received concerning the fruits of our preaching, we have a right to believe that there are many others that have not been made known to us. Our sacred ministry (our adversaries should remember) has no confessional; but it has confession, without spiritual constraint exercised upon him who makes it, without absolution decreed by him who receives it, but so intimate as to concern everything pertaining to life and death, all the emotions, the griefs, the errors, the hopes of the human soul.

Another special aspect of these encouragements of our labour, and of these proofs of the importance of preaching, deserves to be pointed out. The responsibility of the hearer is involved as well as that of the preacher. Bossuet was right in saying, 'If you do not go from. this sermon more a Christian, you will go from it more guilty.' But this power of preaching is due especially to the fact that it is indirect, general, impersonal; the pulpit orator deals with all the world, comprehending himself in it, and each one deals with his own heart; advanced and pious Christians, irresolute and troubled spirits, sceptics of every shade, careless ones of every degree of security and forgetfulness, each takes what comes to him, and, on his own responsibility, what suits him, and hence it results that we know not what is the feature, the exhortation, the reproach, the counsel, even the simple quotation of Scripture, which strikes. Often a saying which appeared to us very insignificant and ordinary, a discourse which cost us very little trouble to write or to extemporise, finds an unforeseen and sudden echo in the depth of some irresolute or anguished heart. What pastor's memory is not full of recollections of this kind which are extremely varied, and what is the public career in which every time that he is called to discharge the principal duty, the functionary may not encourage and strengthen himself by saying, 'I do not know all the good that I am about to do?'

I delivered, at Amsterdam and at Paris, a sermon upon this text: 'In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men' (Matt. xv., 2). If there is a common and worn theme, it is that of this very simple discourse, the parallel of the morality of the world, and that of the Gospel; the sermon contains this certainly very ordinary passage: See how the world understands justice; my right! it cries on every side, my whole right, my right without abatement, my right without diminution; my right according to the letter of the law and often with what hardness those whose exorbitant and cruel demands we wish to soften, reply, "I am in the right; I have the law on my side; the consequences do not matter to me," and the consequences are, perhaps, the loss, the ruin, the poverty of a whole