Chapter III (5)

This was the origin of what is now known as the _Presentation Order_, and was the last and crowning glory of Nano Nagle's remarkable career. Though of exclusively Irish origin, and notwithstanding that the original design of its foundress has been somewhat changed, and its field of labor circumscribed and partly occupied by other orders or congregations, the institution founded by her with such limited means and materials has, with God's blessing, flourished with amazing rapidity, and has spread its influence, not only over the native land of the foundress, but to Great Britain, the lower provinces of North America, and even to India and Australia. In Ireland alone there are at least fifty convents of the order, with poor schools, industrial schools, and asylums for the aged attached.[202]

In 1791 the society was reorganized and founded into a congregation at the request of the Bishop of Cork. The brief of Pope Pius VI. granting the prayer, directed that the members should observe as near as possible the rules governing the Ursulines, taking, after proper novitiate, simple vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Sixteen years later the congregation was changed into an order by brief of Pius VII., under the title and invocation of the "Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary." The rules and constitutions governing the congregation and order were, at the request of His Holiness, drawn up by Dr. Moylan, approved by the archbishops and bishops of Ireland, and upon being forwarded to Rome, and upon proper examination, received the Papal sanction.

The six or seven years spent by Miss Nagle as head of the Society of the Presentation were perhaps the most useful of her life; for not only did she create and perfect a plan of practical instruction and discriminating charity which has since been of infinite benefit in promoting the cause of religion and industry in other parts of Ireland; not only did she inculcate in others who were to survive her, principles of order, charity, and self-denial, but she organized a system of relief and a scheme of instruction which were of infinite benefit to the deserving poor of Cork, and which were afterwards applied with equal advantage by other religious bodies in other cities and towns. None knew so well as she did to whom to give and whom to refuse, though it may be well imagined that her gentle heart, when it erred, leaned in favor of the latter.

Nor must we suppose that the early years of what might be called her missionary labors were devoted exclusively to the instruction of her little waifs. On the contrary, much of her time--all, in fact, that could be spared from her private devotions and her beloved schools--was devoted to the visitation of the sick and the relief of the starving; for starvation, be it remembered, was even then chronic in the South of Ireland. On her return from France, she at first mingled occasionally in society, as much to conceal, perhaps, her immature plans as in deference to the wishes of her friends; but gradually she withdrew from all association with those of her own station, and devoted her entire time to acts of practical charity. Even the most inclement winter weather could not deter her from her duty; and it is said that before daylight she might be noticed wending her way to the little North Cork chapel, to hear Mass as the commencement of a long day's labor, and that far into the night, in the unlighted streets of Cork, a female figure, closely enwrapped in a cloak and bearing a lantern, could be seen hurrying to the death-bed of some poor sufferer, regardless of rain or snow or the cutting night-blast. So familiar had this apparition become to the citizens, and so well her errands of mercy were known, that the vilest of both sexes passed her with respect, and she trod the lanes and alleys of the worst parts of the city with perfect safety. At the sight of that little lantern in the distance, the drunken brawler, as he reeled home, ceased his ribald song or stayed the half-uttered oath; and the ill-starred wanderer, the pariah of her sex, fled to some hiding-place, or came forth for a few words of gentle admonition, which fell like healing balm on her wounded, sinful soul; for Nano Nagle, in humble imitation of her Redeemer, had charity for all, even for the most degraded of mankind.

It is unnecessary to say that, in all her toils and struggles, Miss Nagle enjoyed the respect and esteem, and, when required, the assistance, of all the more wealthy and respectable of the citizens of Cork, Protestant as well as Catholic; but it was amid her children and in the hovels of the poor that she was best beloved, because best known. Where famine hollowed the cheek and glazed the eye, she was to be found, with her brave words of comfort and hope, and, better still, with her well-filled basket and open purse; where sickness and disease lurked, and the atmosphere of the miserable dwellings of the fever-stricken was laden with almost certain death, her place was at the bedside of the dying, consoling and solacing; now administering the cooling draught to the poor patient's burning lips; now, by prayer and spiritual instruction, endeavoring to smooth the path to a better world of the soul that was struggling to be free. No danger daunted her, no sight, however repulsive, stayed her persistent charity; and it is even said that the once brilliant and accomplished favorite of the Rue St. Germain did not hesitate, when she considered herself called upon to do so, to perform the most menial of domestic offices for her sick or aged pensioners.

Thirty years of such unremitting labor was more than a constitution of ordinary strength could well bear; and even Miss Nagle, buoyed up as she was by intense devotion to the poor, felt that the hand of death was upon her, and that she was about to receive the eternal reward of her virtues, her charity, and her zeal in the service of God. Early in 1784 her health completely broke down, and, thus timely warned, she prepared, with Christian sincerity and humility, to leave the scenes of her earthly labors, and pass through those portals which, for the just, open to an infinity of happiness. In the house of the society, and surrounded by its members, her spirit calmly took its upward flight on the 26th of April, 1784. Her last advice to her little community was: "Love one another as you have hitherto done."

Such, in brief, were the life and labors of one whose name even is seldom heard, and of whose heroic efforts in the cause of religion and education so little mention is made beyond the boundaries of the locality in which she wrought and which she sanctified. Judging her by the sacrifices she made, there may be found many even of our own day equally meritorious; but considering the age in which she worked, the dangers and difficulties which constantly beset her path, the invincible energy with which she surmounted all obstacles, and the widespread and beneficent character of the results of her thirty years' toil, we may assuredly place her among the most remarkable and most devoted of the daughters of the church.

FOOTNOTES:

[199] _Terra Incognita; or, The Convents of the United Kingdom._ By John Nicholas Murphy. London: 1873.

[200] There are now in England and in Wales alone two hundred and thirty-five convents, containing about three thousand nuns of various orders and congregations. Among these is the Presentation Convent in Manchester, to which is attached a female orphanage, a poor school attended by four hundred and seventy-five day and five hundred Sunday-school scholars.

[201] _Terra Incognita._

[202] The convents are those of the city of Cork, South, opened in 1777, in which is also an asylum for aged women; the city of Cork, North; Bandom, Doneraile, Youghal, Midleton, Fermoy, Michelstown, Limerick, Killarney, Tralee, Dingle, Milltown, Cahirciveen, Millstreet, Listowel, Castleisland, Thurles, attached to which is an industrial school; Cashel, with an orphanage and an industrial school; Fethard, Ballingary, Waterford, Dungarvan, Clonmel, Carrick-on-Suir; Lismore, George's Hill, Dublin; Roundtown, near Dublin, Maynooth, Clondalkin, Lucan, Kilkenny, Castlecomer, Mountcoin, Carlow, Maryborough, Kildare, Bagnalstown, Clane, Stradbally Portarlington, Mount Mellick, Wexford, Enniscorthy, Drogheda, Rahan, Mullingar, Granard, Tuam, Galway, and Banmore.

GRACE SEYMOUR'S MISSION.

In a small village of New England, elm-shaded and far from the resorts of travellers, there lived, a great many years ago, two people in easy circumstances, the owners of a lovely cottage--a father and his only daughter.

They were well descended, and fully showed it; moreover, the girl's mother had been an Englishwoman of high birth, the daughter of a great house which, in the past, had also been allied to that of the man she married. Edward Seymour had once been the pastor and the favorite of the village of Walcot, an upright, believing, uncompromising Calvinist, a kind of Cromwell with all the ambition turned heavenwards, and all the hardness tempered by a warm, generous nature. His wife also had been a vigorous believer in the same theology. Sprung from a family noted for its "Low Church" views in England, she had been strongly interested in the narrative of the American missionary, in the days when he, fresh from the university, and filled with vehement but practical enthusiasm, had gone to the "mother country" on a tour of alms-asking and receiving. From interest sprang attraction; then love, with its impulsive and whole-hearted logic, rushed in and pleaded the cause of the disciple with that of the religion, and suggested forcibly that a fortune thrown at the feet of the minister would eventually find its way to the feet of God. Sweet argument of the heart! though in this case an argument misapplied.

So it fell out that, despite warnings and shakings of heads and holding up of hands, Elizabeth Howard and her fortune (not a princely one, though) crossed the seas, and Edward Seymour presented a fair young foreign enthusiast to his congregation as his beloved and hard-won bride, under the fire of a rude battery of eyes belonging to the startled maidens whose charms had long since (in their own individual minds, at least) been destined for the minister's solace and support. She won her way into the hearts of all, this young English Calvinist, full of pure-hearted sincerity, gentle yet steadfast as "Priscilla, the Puritan maiden," courageous in self-denial that the poor might profit by her privations, a confidant the most unhappy ever found sympathetic, and the most guilty, indulgent. Her husband used to say of her that the Scriptures had never received a more fitting and perfect fulfilment, a more ideal accomplishment of true womanhood, as set forth in the many sentences where wise and holy women are depicted, than Elizabeth had proved herself to be.

In household matters she was no less at home than in those graver concerns of the parish and the soul-life of her husband's spiritual people. A good deal of the old earnestness regarding religious truth remained in the little favored community of Walcot, and serious, intelligent investigation was one of the many sturdy though reverential habits of thought that yet lingered with these world-forgotten villages. To Seymour himself the place was a paradise; the work was not such as to overtax his bodily strength to that degree that leaves but little energy for the intellectual requirements of his calling; neither was the stress upon his imagination so unwholesomely great as it is with too many of his successors, whose brain, in order to froth up according to their Sunday audience's expectations, must be in a moral ferment for the previous six days of the week. His wife, no frivolous gossip to whom tea and petty scandal are dear, no mere drudge from whom household cares have worn away the bloom of poetry and the freshness of early enthusiasm, was to him a living guide, a true helpmate, bearing his burdens and sharing his joys, a gospel-law written in sweetest, most natural human characters, and a most winning, womanly embodiment of the stern and glorious word "Excelsior."

Was it a reward for _her_ many virtues, or a trial for _his_ strong and faithful nature, that God should call her hence, and close the book abruptly which had been to her husband a living commentary on the divine law? Yet it happened so, but not at the outset of their purified love-career; for when Elizabeth Seymour came to die, she saw not only her husband near her, with faith subduing sorrow in his inspired eyes, but two children, one a girl of fifteen, the other a boy of four years, the only ones she had had, but upon whom she had lavished the holy mother-love that would have been intense still for each had her children numbered as many as the sons of Jacob.

Grace--she had been called so because it was through earnest prayer alone that her mother had survived her birth--was holding her father's hand, while his other one and her own were clasped in the dying woman's wasted fingers; and as the little one at her feet pulled unconsciously at her long dress, she felt her heart throb strangely, solemnly, when her mother said:

"Grace, I leave you my place; be a helpmate to your father, be a mother to little George. Bring him up a brave, Christian man, like _his_ father--like _my_ father, for whom he is named. Never let him do wrong, though the greatest worldly advantages might be the result. Remember that, my child; offer your life to the Lord sooner than see your brother offend him. God bless you, my precious Grace!"

The sick woman turned her longing eyes earnestly upon her husband, and he, half kneeling, sank on the floor, and supported her head on his shoulder. The burden was featherlight, but the strong man shook and swayed as in mortal weakness, and his voice was low and broken. Grace took the child's hand, and turned away. Those last moments were too sacred even for a daughter's eye to gaze upon; angels alone listened to the secret heart-speech of those two, whose lives had been as the two strands of one rope. They had been all in all to each other. The husband's love, if the greatest, had not been the less faithful; but the burden was now for him, the reward for her. Strange dispensation--and yet one that no lover would alter if he could--that the deepest love should be but an earnest of the deepest suffering; that the higher the heart goes in its sublime learning, the greater should be its privilege of agony. And yet this thorny path is a very Via Triumphalis, and those who tread it would not give one drop of the royal purple that dyes their weary feet for all the kingly mantles of rare and costly hue that grace the throne of the earthly monarch or strew the path of the earthly victor. Edward Seymour had a double right to this brotherhood of sublimest sorrow; for in his heart his love had grown so strong that not once, but many times, it had held unholy struggles with the higher, wider Love, to whom he had vowed himself from his childhood, and he had had to wrestle mightily with its strength, and had only overcome because, after all, the enemy he fought was human, and the weapons he used were of God's eternal fashioning. In Elizabeth's calmer, more even nature, love had never risen to that height; it had flowed a tranquil stream in the channel of duty, and, if deep, had never been turbulent. The trial had never come to her which had threatened shipwreck to her husband; she had never even known of it, for it had been the _one_ secret of his frank and pure life. The awful moment came at last; Grace and little George had come nearer again, and all three said afterwards that "Jesus" was the last sound that passed the dying woman's lips. For a few minutes a trembling stillness reigned; it was as if those left behind were listening to the feet of the bearer-angels that had come to carry their mate away. Could they but have listened at the same time to the wondrous revelation of lightning-like truth that flashed from those angels' solemn eyes, and transformed the blind belief of the living woman into the exultant faith of the heaven-illumined Catholic! Strange and awful thought! that those from whose mortal sight the scales have only just been taken by death should, on the instant, enter into such communion with the unknown, unsuspected truth, and be borne so far deeper in its blessed knowledge than those who spend lives of long and humble search on earth. Elizabeth Seymour knew now where truth had always been, and yet she must look with spirit-eyes on her loved ones bending over her beautiful, senseless body, all unconscious of that truth, all unknowing of their dark and dangerous pathway. Would her agonized prayers ever bring them to her new resting-place? Would God ever allow them to join her in the other world? And meanwhile, the minister, with his dear burden still in his clasped arms, lifted his head, and poured forth a prayer into which his very life was breathed, ending with a passionate flinging of his whole nature into the bosom of the all-knowing, all-loving Father--"Thy will be done, not mine!"

As he lifted the inanimate form gently on the pillows, closed the eyes, and pressed a kiss of all but despairing grief upon the white, warm forehead of the lost one, his daughter, letting the child go, seized his hand, and pressed it to her bosom, kissing it passionately, as if, from the very instant of her mother's departure, she was taking possession of the precious trust made over to her on the same spot only a few short moments before.

He, ever mindful of others before himself, felt his child's signal, and pressed her hand in return, leading her gently from the room, while the old nurse, his wife's attendant from her early childhood by the sunny brooks and fragrant meadows of Gloucestershire, performed the last necessary duties towards the loved remains.

Day after day the dead lay in a darkened room, with flower-wreaths framing her simple coffin, a queen in death as she had been in life, with a touching court about her of widows and orphans, of mourners comforted, of children and old men, of strong young laborers whose minds she had turned soul-wards, and whose reverence for her had been little less than that--so misconstrued by those very men--of Catholics for a patron saint. At night, when the stream of villagers would cease, the husband and the daughter watched hand-in-hand by the one they could not think of as really gone from them while her sleeping form lay so near their own resting-place. Now and then the minister would say a few words, half in soliloquy, half to his companion, and she, with her clear, pitying gray eyes upturned, would look at him in dumb sympathy, and a pang would shoot through his heart, as he read the mother's expression in the daughter's face. They renewed the flowers and rearranged the internal draperies of the coffin; they spoke in whispers, as one does in a sick-room, fearing to wake the happy dreamer whom the first sleep has just come to relieve from a load of burning pain and constant restlessness; little George was even allowed to bring his quiet toys, and crawl over the floor round the strange bed where he was told his mother was sleeping--at first sight of the coffin, he had asked gravely, Was that a cradle, and had a new baby come to play with him?--and, in a word, the death-veiled chamber seemed more like home than any other part of the cottage. Then came the last day, and the lid was to be fastened over the white-robed, white-crowned sleeper. Grace brought her father a bunch of heliotrope to lay in her mother's hands; it had been her own and her husband's favorite flower in life; and just over her heart, together with a heart-shaped paper, on which the name "Jesus" was illuminated in red and gold, was placed a triple tress of hair, and attached to it a scroll with the names of "Edward--Grace--George." Thus something living, something of her earthly treasures, went down with her to the tomb; and on the day of the great awakening, who shall say that those tokens will not make the wife and mother's heart throb with a deeper joy, as she rouses herself to meet those whose last pledge of undying love she will find thus laid on her breast?

Slowly the procession moved to the meeting-house, and slowly on to the churchyard; a neighboring minister performed the simple service, and the three bereaved ones walked immediately behind the coffin. The villagers were more awed by the face of the husband than by the black-palled coffin of the wife; and some one remarked, "It was more as if the minister had been walking between two angels to the judgment-seat of the Almighty than as if, a father and a widower, he was leading his orphan children to a new-made grave."

The silent cottage, buried under its wealth of flowering creepers, seemed very cold and desolate when the mourners returned; tea was laid in the cosey library, the blinds were drawn up, and the little birds twittered in the veranda; everything was ordinary and as usual again, the same it had been just one week ago, the day before _she_ died; but it seemed so different! Mr. Seymour threw himself in an arm-chair by the window, and took up a paper-knife mechanically; little George had been taken up-stairs, and the third chair at the tea-table was for the kind clergyman who had come to help his brother in his affliction.

Grace had taken off her bonnet and shawl, and was making tea in the tea-pot that, together with the high, old-fashioned English urn, had been one of her mother's most cherished wedding-gifts. Tears came to her eyes and blinded her, and her hand shook as she touched the tea-caddy of old English oak and wrought iron. Still, with all these homely mementos rendering her sad inauguration of new duties sadder still, she bravely thought of her trust, and struggled successfully to be calm, at least in outward seeming. Her father's friend now came in, and sat down in silence in a low chair opposite Mr. Seymour. Grace laid her hand on her father's arm:

"Will you have your tea here by the window, on the little, low table?" she said tremulously.

"No, my pet," he answered, taking her hand, and stroking it gently; "let us sit down together, as usual." And he led her to her new place at the head, as if he wished her to see that he would not shrink from the everyday details of sorrow that each triviality of life would be too certain to throw into relief.

They made no pretence of talking beyond the few necessary questions of even the smallest assemblage at tea; but when Mr. Ashmead, their guest and the minister of the neighboring parish, said that he thought he must leave on the morrow early, both his host and his young, grave hostess begged he would stay for a few more days, till next Sunday even, if he could.

And so the new life began--the life we meant to start with at the beginning of our story, but which has seemed so to need its introduction, to be so much more interesting through it, that we could not help putting in this long, explanatory prelude.

* * * * *

The long days of winter passed, and a year was gone since the day that saw Elizabeth Seymour's burial. Grace was growing tall and womanly, and had taken her mother's place with as great seriousness as success. She it was who taught her little brother all he was capable of learning at his age; she who helped the worn-out teacher in the school; she who copied out her father's sermons, and looked out his texts and quotations.

The father and daughter, now knit together by a doubly tender tie, and fully realizing all its happy solemnity, turned to the welcome occupations of study to fill the many vacant hours their duties allowed them. Mr. Seymour's library was extensive, and every month brought from Boston some valuable and interesting additions. Of course, theology figured mainly among the subjects treated of in these old and new books; but not alone the theology of his own sect, for he had the early fathers' magnificent works, those Thebaids of literature where the vastness of the seemingly endless desert is only a veil for the innumerable caves of deepest science, and hidden recesses filled with most beautiful dogmas. The councils, too, were not unrepresented on his shelves, though the earlier ones were to him the best known and the least obnoxious. Among them was a dusty little book, in ancient type, evidently a very hermit of a book, whose solitude had not been disturbed since, by some accident, it had once made its way there among the miscellaneous collection of a small library purchased nearly twenty years ago. We may have occasion to refer to it again.

Mr. Seymour, confident of the truth of his own doctrines, never hesitated to simulate doubts and ask questions, or propound religious problems for the further mental training of his daughter's inquiring disposition; but this habit of constant investigation at last produced in her a tumult of the brain which she found she no longer had the power to quell. Questions forced themselves upon her, doubts wrestled for mastery in her mind, all things began to take strange, hitherto undreamt-of shapes, and truths, elusory yet alluring, seemed to rise out of axioms which she thought she had long ago laid aside as proved and dangerous errors. She strove to hold on to her once blind and unreasoning acceptance of her father's teaching. She would have welcomed any superstition, could it only have promised her peace; but the restless spirit, once roused in her, hurried her remorselessly, till at last, in sheer despair, she turned to sweeping and systematic denial of everything she had been taught to look upon as truth.

At first she did not speak to her father about these strange experiences; she clung to the idea that it was physical excitement, a fever of the brain, which would subside and let her see her landmarks plainly once more. But the tempest grew wilder and more hopeless; questions rose up, and would not be crushed out of existence--faced her and mocked her, and would not be answered by the catechism formulas she strove to oppose to them; her life seemed resolving itself into an eternal, tormenting, unspoken, but ever suggested "why?" that rose and took the shape of a demon she could not lay nor yet would listen to. Importunate voices were all around her, chasms opened on every side; and while she taught her little brother, and wrote out her father's sermons, it seemed as if a stern and pitiless query sounded within her very heart, demanding why she abetted the enslaving of other minds to codes of which she herself felt the utter insufficiency. The keenest misery to her was that this mocking voice, whose every vibration pulled down a stone of her former religious temple, and sent it echoing in hollow tones of fiendish triumph down the recesses and depths of her torn heart--this voice never suggested one idea upon which she might have seized and made the corner-stone of a new organization of truth. The strange demon that beset her seemed, to her agonized mind, the spirit of heartless destruction only, not even of the most perishable and paltry substitution. Hollow, empty, heartless, seemed life to her; faith gone, or proved an illusion good only for those whose weak brain could not bear the spiritual loneliness of unbelief; the world a charnel-house, in which death-doomed fools quarrelled about precedence in another world, whose very existence was a myth of their own miserable creation; life a journey aimless and useless, and the faiths men carried through it only so many wind-threatened torches they bore for their own deception--was this all, was this the beginning and the end? Blindly her heart cried out, "Somewhere there must be a God, somewhere there must be happiness!" and the fiend within her brain made answer: "There is no God save the one the coward imagines; there is no happiness save that which the fool finds in ignorance."

One day, after many months of this life-wearing struggle, Grace spoke of her state to her father; and strange indeed was the shock to the earnest, clear-thinking minister. Grave and tender, he tried to handle the wounded child, but Grace was not to be soothed into faith; it was conviction she required. Firmly yet patiently she heard him, and answered:

"All that I have said to myself, but it is of no avail."

He tried to speak to her of her mother--of her belief, her unwavering hope in God, her sure knowledge of Jesus, her feeling of rock-bound security at the moment of her death; but to all this Grace answered: "I know it all, but I cannot feel it; tell me something else, something more."

Then the father, roused out of his half-hopeful state as to her difficulties, and out of his hitherto so sweet reliance upon her kindred strength, turned to the dogmatic aspect of his faith, and prayed fervently that the Lord would open his child's eyes once more, and draw her in out of the cold desert where her soul wandered, a shivering stranger. But, alas! those apparently clear-cut arguments, those knife-like dogmas, so trenchant, so uncompromising, those technicalities of crystallized religion, so satisfying to the old exiles and first settlers of New England, fell unheeded on the ear of Grace, who, had she believed them, would have been as competent a teacher of them as her own father, as far as her thorough knowledge of their slightest details went. Mr. Seymour was trying to do God's work; he was trying to _create_, to give life to a lifeless organization, to put a quivering human soul into a shapely but ice-cold form.

Grace had once said she did not want example nor personal experience, but clear, frigid demonstration. She was right as to the seeming want in her soul--the want of absolute, incontrovertible truth; she was wrong as to the fire from heaven, which was her real want--the purely personal gift of faith, direct from God, which only can descend and strike the waiting soul as a sacrifice, and enkindle it for ever, no more to be extinguished by error or by doubt.

Another year passed, and things were unchanged. No, not unchanged, for Mr. Seymour, in his great anxiety to bring his daughter back to the old belief in which he and his ever-remembered wife had been so carefully reared, had explored hitherto sealed books and commentaries in the vain hope that, since none of the old arguments touched her, some newly suggested ones might. He did not expect to find anything in these works which would strike _him_ as either proving or disproving his settled belief; still, he thought chance might throw into his hands some demonstration that would have the desired effect upon Grace. She seemed to be inclined to magnify beyond his utmost powers of toleration the absolute independence and free will of man; she proudly took her stand on human reason, insisting that if there were a creative God, and if it were really he who had given reason to man, it followed that this regal gift must be allowed full play in determining the object of faith. His Calvinism rebelled and retreated to its old entrenchments, denouncing reason as the natural enemy of faith, as an inventive principle ever actively evil and godless. But he once read in a work of one of the "great" reformers these strange and somewhat coarse words:

"The devil's sole occupation is to get the Romish priests to measure God's will in his works, with reason."

He was staggered. He searched his book-shelves for some work of Catholic theology. As he was passing his hand along the volumes, and running his eye down their titles, the little, dusty book we have mentioned fell down. He picked it up, and, looking at it carelessly, saw its name, _Catechism of the Council of Trent_. Curiosity at once made him forget the first motive of his expedition among the books, and he sat down to examine the newly-found volume. By and by he got interested, and from page to page his eyes ran eagerly, now sparkling with defiance, now widening in astonishment, and anon his brow contracting with intense earnestness, as clear dogmas revealed themselves from out the ancient text--dogmas directly opposite to his own, it is true, yet at every moment appealing to rational and unbiassed human nature.

Here man was represented as a grand monument of God's glory, a being worth redemption in the eyes of God, a creature endowed with intellectual gifts to lead him rationally towards faith and virtue, even as he was provided with feet to carry him to the clear mountain-spring, and with hands wherewith to till the yielding, fruitful soil. Here he beheld a humanity not degraded to brutishness by the fall, but redeemable through the very qualities God's grace had yet left to it; here he saw reconciled man's dignity and God's majesty; here, in a word, a religion which, claiming to be divine, was consequently not afraid to acknowledge and to guide the good tendencies whose very humanness put them beyond the pale of competition with herself. Mr. Seymour had always been taught to adhere to the Bible as the one infallible rock of salvation; he now saw the Bible merged into a system he had once called idolatrous, but could not at present stigmatize as such. He determined to read the Bible from the point of view of the Council of Trent, for pure intellectual curiosity's sake, he said to himself. Alone and almost hiding from his daughter's still hopeless but always eager inquiries, he began this study, with what result would be almost useless to mention. The Council of Trent had seemed plausible when studied by itself; but when referred to the book he had always called the rule of faith, this council was irrefutable. Could he have been mistaken all his lifetime? could it be that God had purposely left him in ignorance so long? Or was not his belief at least as good as the faith of the Council of Trent? But then came his clear philosophical training to the rescue; for, it said, how can contradictory axioms both be true? Hitherto he had unhesitatingly held the Catholic doctrines to be intrinsically, nay blasphemously untrue, and it followed that his own, their direct contradictories, must be right; but if, upon examination, the reverse was evidently the case, then his former opinions--for doctrines he could no longer call them--must be radically, irredeemably false. One day he spoke to Grace about it, and was surprised at the calm manner in which she received a communication whose mere rudiments had been such a shock to him. To her mind, this curious development of her father's researches was a really interesting study, quite apart from its religious bearing, and considered principally as a logical _passe-temps_. But to her father it was a heart-stirring reality, which he pursued with all the hitherto pent-up passion that his cold creed had forced to run in such narrow channels. Once he said to his child:

"Grace, I used to believe the Bible was the only rule of faith; but I never saw that the Bible presupposed a church, a heaven-ordained society to shelter it from the conflicting explanations and interpolations of men; presupposed, also, a willing obedience on the part of the faithful to believe it as it is written, not a desire to shrink from its plain teachings and explain away its doctrines. How could we, without a church to interpret it to us, be sure that we were not following some far-fetched human adaptation of its teaching, or pandering to some cowardly modification of its code of morals? No; the Bible presupposes the church, and, without it, would be more of a dead letter than the Hebrew is a dead language."

Grace was silent, and wondered. Her own feelings were as unsettled as ever, but she tried to live less in her own hopeless struggle than in the noble, fruitful, self-forgetting life that was dawning for her father. As his convictions grew deeper and took stronger root, his anxiety for his child waxed more and more terrible. Would the grace of God that had come to him through the yellow pages of an old book never touch her with its rod of power? Had reason no influence on her logical-seeming mind, had sentiment no power on her undoubtedly loving heart? She went about her self-imposed duties as usual, bringing consolation wherever she went, cheering others with words that were powerless to cheer her own heart, kind and considerate to the poor, amiable to all. Her father, smitten with dread as to her bodily as well as spiritual welfare, asked himself how he could expose her at this moment to the poverty that must result from the only step he knew he ought to take. To leave Walcot as a convert meant to throw himself and his children--Grace especially--into the most absolute penury. He could endure it, George would hardly feel it, but his daughter, brave and affectionate as she was, could her shattered heart bear up under so unexpected a necessity? So he cheated himself and hesitated yet; but the evil spirit was to be defeated soon. God could not allow his returning son and no longer blinded servant to wander long in human weakness outside the holy fold.

Grace was sitting at a reading-desk in her father's library one Sunday evening in June, the purple sunset streaming in and giving the lilacs a deeper hue, and the laburnums a more burnished shade, when a young man swung open the garden gate, and, with free and unfettered step, almost ran up to the house-door.

Seeing he was a stranger and a gentleman, Mr. Seymour opened the library window, and leaned out, saying in a courteous tone:

"I am Mr. Seymour, if you are looking for me. I'll let you in directly."

The young man paused with his hand on the door-knocker, and waited till his host came round.

"You must excuse my abruptness," he said pleasantly, as he handed his card to Mr. Seymour. "I am already presuming on a relationship you may choose to ignore."

"Why ignore it? The nephew of my dear wife is as welcome to my house as if he were my own son," answered Mr. Seymour, laying the card on the table. "Come," he continued, "let us be at home at once. I'll introduce you to my daughter, your cousin."

They went into the library together, and the father, turning to Grace, said:

"Here is a cousin from over the sea, child--George Charteris."

Grace had heard her mother talk of her younger sister's marriage to a Mr. Charteris years before she herself was married, so the name was familiar to her.

"I wish, my boy," said the host, "that God had spared your dear aunt to see you here; but he knows best. And you have come to stay with us a little before you go home again, I hope? Have you seen anything yet?"

"I only landed in Boston yesterday," answered the young man, "and have had hard work to get here so soon. I came on business, to tell the truth."

"Really!"

"You see, letters are very uncertain; and I just felt in the humor, so I came across myself. I have got important papers for you. My uncle, George Howard, died five weeks ago at his place in Gloucestershire, and, as he left no children, the estate goes to the next of kin--your son, George Seymour."

Grace and her father looked at each other in solemn, strange wonderment.

"My son!" he said slowly, "my son!"

"Yes, the son of the eldest sister. My mother was the younger sister, you know. And so I came over about it; I am supposed to be a lawyer, but the fact is, business is not overpowering with us young fellows, and, as I had enough money to spare, I thought I would sooner go myself than pay a man to make a mess of it. You and my father are appointed guardians during the minority of the heir."

"And they will expect him to go and live in England?" said the father thoughtfully.

"Of course; will there be any difficulty about that?"

Seymour did not reply; he only glanced at his daughter with an awed expression about his face. She was looking at him intently. Young Charteris noticed how ill she seemed.

The rest of the evening passed very sociably, and, having shown his young guest his room, Seymour returned in his dressing-gown and slippers to the library. Grace stole in softly, still dressed, and looking anxious. She drew a chair beside him, and, taking his hand in her own, said solemnly:

"Dear father, it was ordained we should leave this place."

"Was such _your_ idea also, my child?" her father asked.

"Of course; and if I have not spoken of it before, my dear father, it was only because I was waiting for _you_ to mention it first."

It seemed a reproach! Was God using this blind instrument to show him more forcibly where his duty lay?

"I know, father," continued Grace, "what that means for you in the circumstances you newly stand in. It means that you will not be allowed to be guardian to your son, that you will be denied access to him, that he will be brought up a Protestant before your eyes, and that practically you will be as homeless as the outcast you would have made yourself from this village and this church. But remember, whatever happens, Grace is always with you--will always be, whether she believes or not, happy or wretched, poor or rich, until it shall be your own pleasure to drive her from your side. Although thy God may not be my God, yet thy people shall be my people, and we will stand or fall together!"

"My brave child!" was all the father could answer through his tears.

"But, father dearest," she resumed in a quick, decided voice, "if George is to be brought up as you wish, the first thing to secure is his being rightly baptized; and you can do that this very next day. I shall be allowed to see George, and thus my mother's trust will be in my hands yet."

"O my girl! it is hard, you cannot tell how hard."

"I have lost what you have won, father. Think you the loss of faith a lesser evil than the changing of it?"

"Poor child! poor child! God grant you may see it one day."

"God grant I may," she answered frankly, "if it be the truth."

They spoke far into the night, and Seymour determined to announce from the pulpit next Sunday his unshaken conviction of the truth of the Catholic faith, and to take a final leave of his congregation. Young Charteris knew nothing of it. George was baptized the following morning. The week passed by, and the young English cousin was more than ever attracted by the strange, silent, preoccupied manner and the serious, anxious beauty of his girl-companion. A gay young man, with hardly any surface of religion about him, he yet had that deep observative faculty which renders some men's perceptions so acute and true in the field of religion. Half an unbeliever himself for fashion's sake, he was yet quick to detect how really far from unbelief the seemingly cold, doubting girl's heart was; and he smiled to himself as he shrewdly thought how both Puritanism and this present phase of feeling would be rudely shaken when brought face to face with the hot-pressed life of wealthy, bewildering London. But something whispered to him that neither father nor daughter would allow the brilliant world to stand between them and their convictions, whatever those might be. Meanwhile, Charteris romped with little George, who was wisely kept in ignorance as to his new honors, and the days sped fast towards the eventful Sunday which was to have so strange and stormy an ending.

The Saturday previous, Mr. Seymour sat at the window of his library, in his favorite arm-chair, his daughter leaning her head upon his knee, and holding one of his hands clasped to her bosom. For a long time there was a silence; then, like the evening breeze just born among the tree-tops, a faint whisper of conversation began to stir the quiet of the darkened room. The sun was gone down, and the crescent moon was rising in white mistiness behind the shrubbery.

"It was just such a night, Grace," said the minister, "that we sat here with Ashmead more than two years ago--the day we began our new life without your dear mother; and now we have turned another leaf already, and are on the threshold of another new life!"

"Yes, my own darling," said his child; "but it is not without me that you are going to begin it. In any case, I shall never leave you. And if we are parted from little George, why, what can we do but cling more and more to each other?"

"Have you thought, Grace, that it may be a life of toil that we are going to meet?" asked her father earnestly.

"Father dearest, would my mother have shrunk from entering it with you? And do you think _I_ love you less than she did?"

"My brave girl!" he answered, with a soft light coming into his dreamy eyes. Presently he said: "But, Grace, you will have little consolation, little support, for my principles are leading me; but you?"

"My love for you is _my_ guide!" she said fervently.

"Truly, my child, you are even as Ruth, who clung to Naomi for very love, and thereby reaped the reward of faith. God grant you may be led to the same end through my humble instrumentality."

There was a pause. The father, after a few moments' earnest thought, spoke again.

"Grace, darling," he said, and she started, as if collecting her runaway thoughts.

"Yes," she answered, with a loving look.

"Do not blame me for speaking abruptly, Grace," her father resumed; "for circumstances are such as allow us little spare time for forms of speech. Has it ever struck you that you will most likely marry? And have you noticed your cousin's manner towards you?"

At the first hint of marriage Grace had lifted her great, startled eyes to her father's face; then, on the second and more personal question, she looked quickly down, and a burning blush came like sunset hues over her usually pale cheeks. But she never hesitated nor wavered in her answer, for the blush was more that of surprise than consciousness.

"I never thought of my cousin in that way. Did _you_? And I have thought vaguely some day I might be a good man's wife--a minister's, most likely; but now these strange doubts have come to me, I could have no peace in any new relation in life. In conscience, my father, I could enter upon none."

"Well, child, I am glad so far. But if your cousin had many opportunities, depend upon it he would love you. I only say this to caution you. You know your own heart; you know I could approve such a marriage under certain circumstances, always provided you do not come to the happy truth I have reached. Now, you can act as your conscience and your reason impel you; but it is always better, I think, to work in the full daylight."

"I could not marry as I am now. Besides, I could not leave you."

"You might have to leave me."

"Father!" cried the girl, startled.

"Never mind," he said soothingly, but not offering to explain himself, and then went on: "Supposing a thing to be possible, still, in the case that you remained out of the church, would you let your cousin be your helpmate and your protector?"

"If you wish it, I will think of it, and question my own heart," said Grace; but the words were measured, and the tone was cold. Her father felt it.

"Grace, I did not wish to hurt you, child. I cannot tell you all I meant, for I hardly discern yet what is God's voice within me, and what the voice of my own earthly enthusiasm, perhaps even ambition. But, my own precious daughter, our hearts will always be one; and after God, there is no one on earth more dear to me than you are."

Grace laid her head on her father's knee again.

"So if your cousin Charteris should speak to you on the subject of marriage before your views of religion are changed, you will answer deliberately and calmly, will you not, having searched your innermost feelings well?" said the father.

"I will," said Grace firmly.

The next day dawned fair and bright; the very air had a holiday feel about its quiet, fresh-scented crispness; the birds sang softly in the vivid-painted trees, and it seemed as if nature had reserved a very jubilee of delights for the lovely summer afternoon. Crowds came soberly to church, the children glancing longingly at the tempting hedges, the young people now and then looking into each other's eyes the things they dared not put in words, and would have spoilt in the saying had they done so; to some, older and more spiritually-minded persons, came, on the fragrant breeze, faint suggestions of the fabled millennium, in which they believed with the grasping faith of disappointed souls; to all came, on the wings of this Sunday morning, impressions of peace, of happiness; perceptions of a life holier and higher than that of the present; vague stirrings of the soul, as if some mystery, both dread and beautiful, were coming out to meet them from the unusual radiance of this never-to-be-forgotten day.

Very solemn indeed did the day's brightness seem to the earnest minister; a new bridal, far different from the bridal eighteen years before in the very country for which he was now again bound--a bridal of the soul with sorrow and with sacrifice, a taking up of the crown of thorns and the cross of dereliction. He would walk into the old meeting-house, a hero among his people; he would leave it, an outcast and a leper among his brethren. He would meet his flock a revered pastor, an acknowledged guide; he would go out of that pulpit, his no longer, an exile, a suspected impostor, an accursed and condemned man. And not there only was the sting; beyond and far above it was the human sense of deep humiliation at having to unsay his teaching, to renounce the doctrines he had taught for twenty years, to warn his people of the very faith he had believed in from his cradle. It is no slight thing for a man, learned and looked up to, an eager and practical theologian, to stand before a congregation of intelligent, sharp-witted hearers, and say, "I was mistaken!" For when you feel that every word you speak is changed, as it falls on their ears, into a barbed weapon against yourself, and will be handled by remorseless and unsympathizing fellow-men until twisted into meanings you never dreamed of and deceptions you would scorn, then it is that the painful, human side of the great and heroic sacrifice is revealed, and that our fleshly weakness has to turn perforce in helpless and blind reliance upon God.

Solemn also, and far sadder, seemed the glorious beauty of that Sunday morning to Grace Seymour by her open window, through which came the scent of lilacs and blossoming horse-chestnuts; her books ranged in melancholy silence on the shelf above the mantel, the old family Bible lying solitary and unopened on a little table by itself, an air of desolateness hanging over the simple, innocent-looking room, with its chintz hangings and two or three old prints and faded pictures. Some were of sacred subjects, and these, unless this were the spectator's fancy, seemed more forlorn than any others; Grace herself thought so sometimes, as she would give a pathetic survey to the room that had known no change since her childhood, save when the great change of death had wafted into it some of the old mementos of her English mother's youth.