bridge there floated to their ears
the distant sound of the hamlet church-bell.

"Now let us sit here a while and listen," said Kenelm, seating himself
on the baluster of the bridge. "I see that you brought away your pipe
from the inn, and provided yourself with tobacco: refill the pipe and
listen."

Tom half smiled and obeyed.

"O friend," said Kenelm, earnestly, and after a long pause of thought,
"do you not feel what a blessed thing it is in this mortal life to be
ever and anon reminded that you have a soul?"

Tom, startled, withdrew the pipe from his lips, and muttered,--

"Eh!"

Kenelm continued,--

"You and I, Tom, are not so good as we ought to be: of that there is no
doubt; and good people would say justly that we should now be within
yon church itself rather than listening to its bell. Granted, my friend,
granted; but still it is something to hear that bell, and to feel by the
train of thought which began in our innocent childhood, when we said
our prayers at the knees of a mother, that we were lifted beyond this
visible Nature, beyond these fields and woods and waters, in which, fair
though they be, you and I miss something; in which neither you nor I are
as happy as the kine in the fields, as the birds on the bough, as the
fishes in the water: lifted to a consciousness of a sense vouchsafed to
you and to me, not vouchsafed to the kine, to the bird, and the fish,--a
sense to comprehend that Nature has a God, and Man has a life hereafter.
The bell says that to you and to me. Were that bell a thousand times
more musical it could not say that to beast, bird, and fish. Do you
understand me, Tom?"

Tom remains silent for a minute, and then replies, "I never thought of
it before; but, as you put it, I understand."

"Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not practically meant
for its benefit and use. If Nature gives to us capacities to believe
that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct
proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kind
and good and tender on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities
to conceive such a Being must be for our benefit and use: it would not
be for our benefit and use if it were a lie. Again, if Nature has given
to us a capacity to receive the notion that we live again, no matter
whether some of us refuse so to believe, and argue against it,--why, the
very capacity to receive the idea (for unless we receive it we cou