and rest--though she owns that the new religion is fuller, far, of
struggles and crosses than the old. "What does our father, the Dean,
say?" I asked lately. "That this 'is at least a respectable vagary,'"
she wrote back, "'which one could hardly say for most of my dreams and
experiments!' Fancy papa's feeling himself authorized to speak of the
spiritual life of anything above a crayfish!--a dear old country
gentleman who is too entirely well satisfied with this world and his
lot in it ever to think of heaven except in an official way, and whose
strongest vocations are matrimony, and the writing mildly learned
antiquarian papers for the West of England Archaeological Society.

"But you like stories. Here is papa's latest: One of his High Church
confreres had been diligently expounding to a navvy the doctrine of the
Trinity, and was boasting to papa of the intelligence of his neophyte.
Papa, who holds very old-fashioned, inhumanitarian ideas as to the good
or possibility of education for the masses, was scornfully incredulous
as to the navvy's getting even an idea of the mystery upon which his
friend had been instructing him. 'Will you go with me to see him, and
convince yourself?' asked the clergyman. 'Delighted,' said papa, and
off they set to find the navvy. After a little talk papa said to the
man, 'This gentleman here tells me he has been talking to you about the
Holy Trinity. Can you give me the names of the Three Persons?' 'Why,
sir,' answered the navvy, 'there's God the Father and God the Son, but,
to tell the truth, sir, I disremember the name of the other gentleman
entirely!' Now I maintain that papa's in the wrong about the navvy, and
that the ritualist clergyman had no reason to be so utterly
disconcerted, as papa declares he was, at this naive answer. Am I
wicked, I wonder, to be repeating these stories? But you know I don't
mean the least irreverence, and I can't help seeing they're droll!
Somebody has said nobody is so irreverent as religious people, but I
always reckoned that a sour-tempered saying, judging after the sense
and not after the spirit. We have some distant Quaker connections where
I visit sometimes, and in that household if one mentions our Lord in
familiar conversation, as if He had a connection with the humble little
events of the daily life, there is always a shocked hush, as if
possibly it might not be unsacrilegious to speak of our Creator save on
meeting days, and with formal removal o