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Christina flushed to the roots of her gray hair.

"Well, dear, I congratulate you then. May you both be happy. You will bring me a dear daughter, I

know."

Laurence's eyes filled with tears. His lip quivered and he bit it to steady it. These family crises are always a little bit ludicrous. Neither heart nor face conforms to high drama. He went to his mother and hid his face in her neck, and in a moment her arms were about him and she too had tears in her eyes.

Rosa, having no audience to consider, dissolved unbecomingly into tears of sympathy. She stood up and threw her arms round her brother's bent shoulders.

"Dear old Laurie," she murmured, "of course we congratulate you, and we'll welcome Lucilla like a sisterindeed we will."

Laurence disengaged an arm and clasped his sister too. How he loved them, these kindly familiar women of his household. His excitement made this old tie reveal its substantial worth. All his sympathies and emotions were quickened. Convention had been broken and they clung together weeping, laughing, kissing each other; a fond, foolish family, conscious that Fate was, perhaps, to destroy their unity.

At last Laurence disengaged himself and sat down. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and became coherent of speech. "You see," he explained, "I couldn't warn you beforehand, as I had no intention of speaking so soon. This trouble of theirs forced my hand. I had to speak now I can stand by them better now, and at least I can offer Lucilla my father's honorable name."

His mother's hand stole out to his along the table.

"Your father would have done just

that if I had been in Lucilla's place."

"But," Laurence continued, "I've loved her since I first met her-before I think, because I was sorry. I know she has faults, Rosa; who hasn't? But they're faults of environment. When she's away from her people, you'll see she'll be mother's daughter." Christina smiled at him.

"No, dear, not that, we must give her personality room. She won't grow like us, why should she? We must show ourselves sympathetic to her. I fear we shall seem a little dowdy and out of things to her. Have you told her what a dull, old, unfashionable mother you have?"

"I've told her a lot, but not that." Laurence gripped the hand he held. "I do want to be a nice mother-inlaw," said Christina. "I know the dangers so well. Laurence, you must bring her soon, or shall I go to her, dear, tomorrow morning?"

"No, you couldn't meet the mother; she is impossible."

"I wouldn't mind."

"No.

I'll bring Lucilla here." Theresa came in to clear away the tea things. She, as one of the family, friend as only faithful servant can be, had to hear the news. Theresa seized Laurence's hand and kissed it. The young man hugged her affectionately.

"Not that, Tessy, not to me," he said; "why, you've spanked me, haven't you, in my babyhood?"

"Never, Master Laurence! Now God bless the day an' that we're all alive! And you that the mistress and I rared and saved from the grave with scarlatina. To think you should be marrying too-and why not,

indeed?"

So the news that the three women had dreaded was outwardly welcomed. Christina went to her room with a strange dizzy sense of fatality. She had to keep herself in check. That all-prevailing duty steadied her. Wom

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Who would love her best now? The little girl who had put her first was wholly given to another, and the son, who more than any other in the world had been soul of her soul, had found another woman to be his comforter and friend. No one now would want her very much she thought. It was natural for youth to choose youth, and it was her place to withdraw and to leave lovers to each other, but bitterness of spirit surged over her. She seemed to see the rest of her life as a vista of barren days unmarked by aught but her failing powers and diminishing pleasures. She was a woman who, according to the proverb, had put all her eggs into one basket, and now the basket was to be emptied.

Christina looked out into the little suburban road, and the chill of old age crept about her heart.

Then suddenly there was a knock at the door, and to her "Come in" entered Laurence. He sat down on the bed and began at once to speak.

"I want to tell you all about it, mater," he said. "I couldn't bear you to think me underhand, or to think that I'd jumped into this without means to support it. You see I got that rise this morning. Of course I'm still as poor as a church mouse, but some income is better than none. I hadn't meant to propose to Lucilla yet, or without consulting you."

Christina turned grateful eyes upon

him.

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She began to

"It was this way. When all the scandal about Warwick Brown came out, I felt I must go and see Lucilla, ask if I could help and so on. I got leave to go out this afternoon, and I went to the house. I found old Mamma Brown in the drawing-room. Jove! she did look a disheveled old hag, but more natural and so more pitiable than I've seen her yet. cry, she said it was for Lucilla's sake; that she would go out to America and join her husband, but that Lucilla hated that life. Then she said how cruel people were in remembering scandals, and that her sin was visited on Lucilla, and that everyone was ready to throw mud at an innocent girl. That's true and I said so. She told me then how that silly affair of our missing the train after the picnic had got about the town, and that it was exaggerated, that some beast said we didn't turn up till next morning."

Christina looked at him with flaming eyes.

"Laurence! she invented it. It was a trap to catch you."

"Perhaps. Anyway I said I wanted to marry Lucilla. So I do."

"Do you, Laurence, truly, or is it just chivalry? If it is I'll go and see the woman myself and tell her that my son can't be caught by wiles of that sort."

Christina was flushed and angry. The maternal protective instinct was aroused. She longed to set her son

free. Gentle as she was, she could have met a virago and not quailed.

Laurence looked away.

"Oh! yes, I want to marry her," he said, "nothing else will satisfy me. It may be a sort of fever, the sort that Lizzie felt for the fruit in Goblin Market, but I should never care for anyone else now."

"But, my son, if the fever dies out?"

"Well, I shall have had my day." "Laurence, I was not in love with your father, but I loved him-still love him dearly."

"You were a Victorian, mother." "Yes," sighed Christina. "So then you saw Lucilla?" he asked.

"I did. Lucilla was in their sittingroom. Oh! she was miserable, mother.

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(To be continued.)

THE RETURN OF RELIGION.

Be our cast of thought favorable to Faith or Unfaith, no one who reflects ever so little on the issues which this World-War has raised can imagine that it will leave Religion where the twentieth century found it. If we stand at the "consummation of the age" then Christianity does so too, and in the foremost line. Dimly the people even outside all Churches, discern so much; and they accept the strange word Armageddon as denoting not only the field of strife but its significance in history. Now, Armageddon is called in the Apocalypse of St. John, "the battle of that great day of God Almighty. And we can be sure that the God here spoken of was not the same with him celebrated by a late eloquent professor as "the ancient, mighty deity of all the Teutonic kindred," Odin the War-God, supposed to be "looking serenely down upon his favorite children, the English and the Germans, locked in a death-strug

gle." He is not Odin, for the simple reason that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And the English have not lifted on high the dragonflag of Ragnar Lodbrog, first cousin to the Prussian Black Eagle, but the Red Cross of St. John of Jerusalem. Our British and now American armies deserve to be named-it is an entirely right description of their aims and objects the ambulance corps of Humanity. They are marching to its aid, so that if they win the Germans themselves will be saved. I have no hesitation in affirming that the Allies, however divided in points of dogma, nay, though some among them profess to have done with Religion altogether are yet in fact fighting for the very heart and essence of the Gospel. If that be so, Christianity is returning and will return. We may look forward to a new, a more glorious period of the reign of Christ.

Fully to comprehend what is hap

pening, let us throw a glance backward over the time, now separated from us by world-shaking events, out of which we have escaped as in an earthquake, through torrents of flame and with disaster all round. I write the word

"escaped" advisedly. For the years

leading up to Armageddon we spent in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I seem to remember when we entered it. Great changes are commonly associated with great names; and here the name is Darwin. Undoubtedly Charles Darwin acted the part of a modern Lucretius. Instead of ether, atoms, and chance, he gave the world Natural Selection. Himself without a tincture of metaphysics, innocent as any country gentleman who took to pigeon-fancying, this most amiable naturalist appeared to have banished mind from the world's development, and so to have made God a needless hypothesis. In such a connection his private beliefs matter little or nothing. Darwin had, in fact, been a sort of Unitarian; his prevailing mood as life went on was agnostic. But the immediate gain of which Natural Selection furnished the capital to unbelief I term Lucretian, because it seemed to prove that life in all its varieties, including man and his works, could have arisen, flourished, and spread over the globe, with no intellect whatever to set it going. That is the philosophy of the Roman poet who "denied divinely the divine" in his marvelous and gloomy verses De Rerum Natura. But Darwin was the crowned, the acknowledged, King of Science after his Origin of Species came out in 1859. The sum of these things is a paradox, science calmly showing us all that its Everlasting Father was nescience. But men of paramount authority hailed this mirk midnight as if it were the rising dawn. Such a formula gave them leave to reckon Theism among the mythologies. In a

"Belfast Address," which once called up innumerable echoes, Tyndall read decorously the Burial Service over it, where no hope of resurrection was held out to God or man.

I touch the lighter and literary fringes of a theme so formidable because I do not wish to die unread. Few comparatively are willing, but neither is the average man mentally robust enough, to read and study arguments on the First and Last Things with such concentration as the subject requires. This general condition of a very faint "Enlightenment," or, as the Germans say, Aufklärung, equally diffused and not less equally confused, gave enormous encouragement to the physical and biological theories, cunningly "wrapped up in facts," in presence of which any doctrine not ending in Materialism had little chance of a hearing and hardly any of acceptance. For Materialism was the ready money or the cash kept for its customers' use at the Bank of Nescience. Among its chief cashiers T. H. Huxley played a famous part. An arrogant yet attractive man, he knew as well as the most orthodox of his opponents that an agnostic could no more doff his cap to the Mud-god Matter than to the Blessed Sacrament of the altar. He declared as much, in stinging terms, with an emphasis aided by his lively language. But the agnostic can declare no assets; yet the people must be paid their dividends somehow. They were paid in scientific notes and cash. The old estate of Humanity was bankrupt. God, Christ, Church, together with conscience, immortality, the soul itself, had been liquidated into zero. When the Macrocosmos had no need of Mind to bring it into being or to keep it on its course of evolution, too plain it appeared that man, the Microcosmos, needed it still less. Matter and motion, both strictly

defined, measured, manipulated in the laboratory, were the only realities admitted to be aboriginal. "Perhaps hardly any living writer," said Mr. H. Coke in 1883, "has contributed so much to the common scepticism, the crass unbelief of the day, as Dr. Huxley."

Yet, on being challenged as if holding this widespread view, the Professor rejoined in high dudgeon that he never had given it a moment's credence. He was a disciple of Hume, in whose eyes the postulates and conclusions that go beyond our instant experience and such is the system of Materialism-can never be more than hypothetical. In Hume's own words, "the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences"; and "all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom." To the pure phenomenist the dogmas of a Materialism such as Haeckel preaches in his Riddle of the Universe would be not less repugnant than the Athanasian Creed, and he would say for a like reason-because they transcend experience.

When, a good many years ago, the present writer summed up Professor Huxley's first principles after this fashion in the Quarterly Review, the Professor declared himself well-pleased on being thus at last understood. The public, I venture to think, did not understand him; but, as Dr. Stirling wittily observed, they took the affirmation of a real and absolute Matter to be the genuine teaching of science, and the Idealism which transformed it to a mere "state of consciousness" "as the tongue in the cheek." Science and Matter were palpable truth to the crowd; from which it followed that Religion and Dogma were fictions, now exploded by the dynamite of Natural Selection. For the entire range of the Knowable could, and indeed must, be developed from physical beginnings in time and

hate, fear,

Now that

space. True it was that H. Spencer admitted likewise the Unknowable. As in the school which Huxley championed Matter was apparently the cause of Mind, yet was itself only a form of mental perception, so in like manner Spencer's Knowable was all that really concerned us, yet we were told that "the interpretation of all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force is nothing more than the reduction of our complex symbols of thought to the simplest symbols; and nothing more than symbols." For the Absolute existed; it was the Unknown Reality which underlay Spirit and Matter. But as it also was, and ever would be, absolutely beyond knowledge we were debarred from exercising in reference to it either intellect or will; we could not love, venerate, or long for it. concerning which we are unable to put forth any act whatever is of necessity just nothing to us. And in this Nothing Spencer was sanguine enough to think that he had reconciled Science and Religion. The agnostic's "worship mostly of the silent sort" at the altar of a never to be known Deity provoked some satire. From a different point of view we might observe that the Spencerian theology resembled a Japanese constitution in which the Mikado should never have the power of quitting his sacred retirement and the Shogun was the only visible and effective sovereign. In such a world it is not hard to guess whither prayers and worship would flow. Speaking enigmatically, the Absolute that does everything but appears nowhere in effect does nothing. This Absolute of Spencer's and that Relative of Hume both overthrow Religion and leave the empty space for superstition to occupy it. In any case they destroy Christianity.

There had been suggested a way of

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