is crying.

"What is the matter, my darling?"

"Papa has been telling me that God hates me worse than a snake."

Poor, gentle, poetical, sensitive, spiritual, almost celestial Mrs.
Jonathan Edwards! On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived,
written down, given to the press, by the child's father; on the other
side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother pleading in
her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered husband. Do you
suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender soul of her darling?
Would it have been moral parricide for a son of the great divine to have
repudiated the doctrine which degraded his blameless infancy to the
condition and below the condition of the reptile? Was it parricide in
the second or third degree when his descendant struck out that venomous
sentence from the page in which it stood as a monument to what depth
Christian heathenism could sink under the teaching of the great master of
logic and spiritual inhumanity? It is too late to be angry about the
abuse a well--meaning writer received thirty years ago. The whole
atmosphere has changed since then. It is mere childishness to expect men
to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their
own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father
was of his son's age.

So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman
Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants. They
have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they
both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession,
the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,--these all inspire a confidence which
without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive
natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres
of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and
smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends,
and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no
wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence.
To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae,
of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place. If Cowper had
been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled by a
Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing, looking
upon himself as a castaway. I have seen a good ma