with the love of God. It is a saying of a saint that "we do not love God more by ceasing to love our fellow-men." The love of our fellows must not come in between us to separate us from the love of God, but should help us to rise into the fulness of His love. The exaggerated way in which obedience has been developed in some orders has made us find its limitations. It is limited in three ways: by the moral law, by the Church's authority, and by the object which the institute proposes to itself. Thus, no one can be commanded to violate a moral precept, or to disobey the purposes for which the sisterhood was formed. The basis of all profitable obedience must be love; the love of God and of all others in Him. Based on these broad principles, the sisterhood has proved a singularly happy and united one.

CHAPTER IX

SCRIPTURE AND THE SACRAMENTS

I will give power unto my two witnesses."

These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth."

I

MUST apologize to my readers for introducing so

much instruction into my book. One could write a book full of anecdotes concerning the persons one has met and details of old controversies which have passed away. I have said enough about the facts of my own outward life to satisfy curiosity, and will try to give some notion of my spiritual one. It is only with the intent of encouraging souls, poor and weak as mortals are, and helping them on, that I have been willing to write what I have. My readers and friends must let me preach a little and not merely write for their entertainment.

There were two things which necessarily engaged my Episcopal attention. The first was the degree of latitude permitted as to belief in Holy Scripture. According to the Church's teaching, Christianity is based upon a Person, Jesus Christ. The Church declares that as God has inspired the writers of Holy Scripture, He is to be regarded as its author. But the Church does not require us to believe in the Scriptures, but to believe in God, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Ghost, in the Holy Catholic Church. The

relation of the Bible to the Church is this: she has separated some of her writings from others, which she calls her Holy Scriptures. She determines what writings are to be put in this class, and by the power of the Holy Ghost dwelling in her, she interprets them. She teaches her children the Faith which she has received from the beginning, and she cites her Holy Scriptures as a witness to it.

In our day there has been a more scientific investigation concerning the origin of the Books of Holy Scripture than ever before. The Church has no opposition to the investigation of science in any department of knowledge. Nothing has so far been demonstrated that contradicts the dogmas she has declared essential. We may allow, for instance, the allegorical character of the early chapters of Genesis without denying the sinful tendency found in man's nature by reason of heredity. Man has fallen away from God.

The late papal pronouncement forbidding a denial of the literal historic account of the origin of man and woman, and the story of the serpent and apple, is much like the condemnation of Galileo and the Copernican theory. This denial had papal sanction. Now, again, Rome goes against modern science and its discovery. To deny what is called the Darwinian theory, or the evolutionary process, is as unwise as to deny the truth of the world's diurnal revolution or orbit about the sun. The one exception the papal decree allows is that the "day" of Genesis may be an indefinite period. Now the discovery of the law