my convictions, that two of my younger sisters, who were committed entirely to my charge, imbibed from my teachings a faith from which even I myself have been unable since to deliver them. Their lives are still darkened by the hope of heaven, still wasted by the love of God, and still weakened by a reliance on God's assistance. And now, Mr. Leigh, I will ask you to think of that. There was a deed done by me years ago, and the effect of it lives yet, and I cannot undo it. Is not that an awful thought? Does not that teach us the importance of our every action? It is true that the influence of some of us -such as myself, for instance-is unusually large: but even you, in your own degree, have had an effect, by your acts, on others, which you will never, never be able to obliterate.'

"Good God!' exclaimed Leigh, I know that well enough, for my sins. If you had as much to reproach yourself with as I have, you would hardly find it so easy to talk about a life happy in healthy energy. To be happy in that way one must have one's mind at ease. One must, before all things, respect and be at peace with oneself. Mrs. Norham, you talked just now about conscience. Now listen to me. I have a conscience, and I can treat it in two ways only. I can either stifle it altogether, or else listen to and be troubled by it. But if I stifle it, I shall have no wish to act rightly; and if I listen to it I fear I shall have no heart to do so.' and Mrs. Norham leaned forward with interest. Tell me,' she said, in a tone of kind severity, 'what on earth do you mean? You would have no heart to do so?'

I mean,' said Leigh, supposing your philosophy to be true. Where can you tell us to look for any remission of sins? How can the soul be again reconciled to itself? And if I must always have to consider myself a sinner, why should I try to become a saint?? e) My friend,' said Mrs. Norham, whose voice was getting more and more persuasive, at last I have you on the hip. You are yourself at this moment an example of the deadly practical influence of the Christian teaching. It was this Christian teaching that your great motive for right action was, not the welfare of others, but your own sanctification: and despairing of that, see now how your own powers are paralysed, and your whole prospect blighted. Cast away the whole of this unhealthy conception. Cease to think about what you have been altogether. That is a poor, paltry, insignificant question. What you have done is the only part of your past that is of the smallest consequence; and even on this you should dwell only in so far as it will warn or guide you for the future. Self-reproach is in this way converted into new social energy; and the man who has done wrong becomes by it literally more capable of doing right. I know this by experience well enough. If I had not once been a Christian, and taught Christianity to others, I should never have half the vigour I now have in attacking it. Mr. Leigh, it was simply

recollecting the wrong I had done to my sisters that enabled me, when I first came here, to tell the parish clergyman plainly how pernicious a thing Christianity had proved to the world.'

"And did you really tell him that?'

"I did indeed,' said Mrs. Norham, pleased by the surprise manifest in Leigh's tone and I told it him face to face, and in the presence of a dozen of his parishioners. Trust me,' she went on, "that that is the true way to repent. The Christian valued repentance because he thought it would make him less guilty: the Agnostic values it because it will make him more useful. Few sins in the world's whole history that have ever become general have had half the wickedness of the repentance enjoined by the Christian Church; few things have been so utterly demoralising. It has consumed the time and broken the spirit of man. That our sins may be remitted, that our iniquities may be put away from us-this has been the one cry of the whole Christian world; and it is a cry that has sprung from selfishness, and begged for an impossibility. It is quite true that the sacrifice of God was a broken spirit; but the sacrifice of Man is a vigorous, a healthy, and a resolved one. For us the only true repentance is amendment to avoid repeating our errors, not to continue thinking about them.'

But suppose,' said Leigh, that no amendment is possible. Suppose the ill done is quite beyond your remedy.'

With respect to the individual, we often may suppose this with truth; but with regard to the race we never can. And here we see the comforting and saving character of the belief of the Agnostic. For him all Humanity is but one great being, and, as I said before, if you do good to any one of its component parts, you are doing good to it. It truly is always present with you; and you can never be beyond its claims on your good offices. I, as I tell you, have given to my sisters a faith, which, alas! no man taketh away from them: but that does not hinder me from endeavouring to take away a like faith from others. Amendment, as conceived of by the healthy mind, refers to doing good, not to undoing bad. Does what I say bring no comfort to you? It is not often that I fail in my attempts at comfort. Listen to me, and let me speak openly. It would be a false delicacy on my part to pretend that I do not know why you have been sent to us. I know of course that you have done things to be repented of; and for this reason I have been trying to teach you what repentance means. One of the nearest results of your actions is that you have pained your father; and the knowledge of this must have some effect upon you. Let that effect be not a fruitless regret; but a fruitful resolve to please him. I know, too, one of the chief causes of the pain you have given. You have become intemperate, and so forth of course we understand each other. Come now, and be honest with me, will you? Is there anything more behind?'

'There is,' said Leigh; but nothing fit, I think, for me to confide to you.'

'Do not say that,' said Mrs. Norham. As Mr. Biggins told you, I know the world; and though I may grieve or disapprove, I am not a woman to be shocked. To be shocked is to run away from an evil in terror, instead of remaining bravely to see that it spreads no farther. Come now,' she said, with a tone in her voice that was a mixture of sharpness and of a subdued encouraging cheerfulness, 'you will find great relief in telling me. When once one has confessed an error, one

loses the morbid horror of it.'

There was a pause of some moments; and then Leigh began abruptly. There came to Oxford about a year ago two orphan girls, of whom the eldest was just three-and-twenty. They were of no social position; their father must have been an artist of some kind, I think but they had a small independence, and they took a little house together on the outskirts of the town, meaning to study, to paint, and to cultivate themselves generally. They were both extremely pretty, and full of that semi-refinement that to girls in their position is so dangerous. A certain young man, who much prided himself on his conquests, saw in an evil hour these two in a picturegallery. He was adroit in his manners, the poor girls were willing, and an acquaintance was formed readily. It is not many months ago that she was found in the lock at Godstow, with a small dead thing-it is the old story-along with her.'

Leigh came to a pause, with his eyes cast downwards. His companion uttered no single word. In a few moments he looked up to her. Her whole expression was changed. She had drawn herself up and away from him; and she was eyeing him with a strange look of aversion that seemed almost to amount to horror.

'What!' she exclaimed at last, with a gasp, and have I been talking all to-night with a-with-with-a murderer!'

'You mistake me,' said Leigh seriously. I was not the hero of the story I have just told you.'

'You were not!' she éxclaimed.

'Good heavens, then, why do you talk to me in these morbid parables? Come, it is getting late. Pull quickly in to shore, and we will talk over these things to-morrow.' Leigh obeyed her.

6

'Mrs. Norham,' he said, not looking at her, as he again dipped the sculls in the dark gleaming water, what I have told you is no parable. The man, though not myself, was a friend of mine; and I know that at the present moment he is rich, happy, and prosperous. He is married to a woman who is devoted to him; he cares nothing, because he knows nothing, of the tragedy he has caused.'

And you mean to say,' exclaimed Mrs. Norham, 'that this depraved, degraded, licentious pleasure-seeker, this unconscienced, thoroughly unsocialised man was your friend?'

'I was so much his friend,' said Leigh, that he took me to the house where the two girls lived; and as he behaved to the younger, so I behaved to the elder. It is through no virtue, no self-restraint on my part that a like tragedy does not lie at my door. If you judge my acts by the mere outward results of them, I do not know what judgment you will pass on me. I have driven a woman not to the grave-but, shocked and changed by her sister's death, to a religious house. My name became connected with the scandal; but the actual truth of the story was never known to the authorities ; nor did I wish for my friend's sake that it should be known. Now you know the reason why I am here with you in Cumberland.'

Leigh who had again been resting on his oars, now again bent himself to his work. Mrs. Norham was silent and abstracted. 'She went into a sisterhood, did she?' she said at length, but as if talking to herself, rather than to Leigh. One of my own sisters did the same.' These were the only words uttered, until they regained the cottage. Mr. Leigh,' she said gravely, as she went up to bed, ‘we will talk more about this to-morrow.'

Poor Mrs. Norham! She knew little of the world, and she had heard things she was not in the least prepared for. She was perplexed and bewildered; and a momentary doubt for the first time arose in her as to her own complete mastery of the whole of human nature.

1

With the next morning, however, there came mental illumination. She rose early; worked vigorously for an hour before breakfast at the 'Fugue in Four Colours,' and when the little party reassembled, she once more saw clearly through everything. As for Leigh, he looked so worn and tired that Mrs. Norham remarked it. 'I was up late last night,' Leigh said, 'writing and making notes.' In spite of his look, however, his manner was bright and cheerful, and the calm easy politeness had come back to him which had so perturbed Mrs. Norham on his first arrival. Now, however, she was glad of this, rather than perturbed by it. She had succeeded in reconciling her severity with her benevolence; and Leigh's present manner would not only justify, but even stimulate her severity.

She took him out with her after breakfast for a walk by the lake's side, and prepared to begin the battle. The new number of The Agnostic Moralist had arrived that morning, and as she held it unopened in her hand, she felt as though she were wielding a sacred wand of power. She observed, to her surprise, though without taking much note of it, that Leigh held in his hands a roll of paper also.

'Mr. Leigh,' she began, you seem singularly cheerful this morning for a man who has so much weighing on him.'

'Do you think so, Mrs. Norham?' he said carelessly. I'm sorry you grudge me my good spirits.'

This at once gave Mrs. Norham an opening. Sir- she began. Leigh turned and looked at her. She met his surprised expression VOL. VIII.-No. 41.

D

with a cold frown. You seem,' she went on, to have forgotten what you told me last night. You seem to have forgotten what lies upon your shoulders. You seem to have forgotten what you are, and in what house. Never,' she said, 'never before in my life did I hear of or know a man with a course of life like yours.' "That,' said Leigh, I can believe very readily.'

'Of course,' said Mrs. Norham, rapidly correcting herself, 'I have heard of such men. As a matter of study and theory, I am of course But they are rare-very rare.'

familiar with them. Leigh smiled. Mrs. Norham saw the smile, and she was more thoroughly exasperated. They were passing by a rude rustic seat; and with an imperious gesture she motioned him to sit down beside her.

'Mr. Leigh,' she began, all her pent-up feelings at last finding vent, do you in the least realise what manner of man you are? Last night, it is true, you looked serious and sentimental enough. Yes-and much good this morning it seems that all your fine sentiments have done you. Is this the right state of mind for a man in your case to be living in—a state of habitual flippancy, only made the more piquant to yourself by the luxury of occasional selfreproaches? Will you ever mend, will you ever grow better in this way? And you-you are the man who try to salve your conscience with silly regrets for a dead or dying superstition, which I know well enough you do not for a minute believe in! It is impossible for me to express fully the intense contempt I feel for you. You may imagine that it is no pleasure to me to be obliged to speak like this. But it is for your own good, and I must do so.'

Mrs. Norham paused. Leigh had meanwhile been unfolding the roll of paper he held in his hand. He now spread it out on his knee; and turning to Mrs. Norham, deliberately and quite gravely: 'I am entirely in your power,' he said. 'I do not resent your anger, though on some few points you are unfair to me. My own self-reproaches are not insincere; and that is the reason why I am not resentful towards you. But I am perplexed: you have been good enough to explain the right and wrong of things to me; but I am so ignorant, I have not completely understood you. Will you bear with me, and answer me a few questions?'

Leigh's words were well chosen, and the effect of them was instantaneous. They did not, indeed, relax Mrs. Norham's severity, but they calmed it. She ceased to be the impassioned accuser; she became the unbending judge.

Leigh began: 'What you said last night to me I had often heard before, but never put with so much personal point, or applied to my individual case. When we parted last night, I thought and thought over all your words, all your expressions, and all the feelings which I could see accompanied them; and I spent a large part of last night in noting all this down, that I might see exactly what