ich it seemed to
him could come only after a determined wrestling with those dogmas that
to his mind were the aptest and compactest expression of the truth
toward which we must agonize. The day of Pentecost showed a great
miracle, indeed; but was not the day of miracles past?

The Doctor, however, did not allow his entertainment of a secret fear to
color in any way his letters of earnest gratulation to his son. If God
has miraculously snatched him from the ways that lead to destruction,
(such was his thought,) let us rejoice.

"Be steadfast, my dear Reuben," he writes. "You have now a cross to
bear. Do not dishonor its holy character; do not faint upon the way. Our
beloved Adele, as you have been told, is trembling upon the verge of the
grave. May God in His mercy spare her, until, at least, she gain some
more fitting sense of the great mission of His Son, and of the divine
scheme of atonement! I fear greatly that she has but loose ideas upon
these all-important subjects. It pains me beyond belief to find her
indifferent to the godly counsels of your pious aunt, which she does not
fail to urge upon her, 'in season and out of season'; and she has shown
a tenacity in guarding that wretched relic of her early life, the rosary
and crucifix, which, I fear, augurs the worst. Pray for her, my son;
pray that all the vanities and idolatries of this world may be swept
from her thoughts."

And Reuben, still living in that roseate atmosphere of religious
meditation, is shocked by this story of the danger of Adele. Is he not
himself in some measure accountable? In those days when they raced
through the Catechism together, did he never provoke her mocking smiles
by his sneers at the ponderous language? Did he not tempt her to some
mischievous sally of mirth, on many a day when they were kneeling in
couple about the family altar?

And in the flush of his exalted feeling he writes her how bitterly he
deplores all this, and, borrowing his language from the sermons he now
listens to with greed, he urges Adele "to plant her feet upon the Rock
of Ages, to eschew all vanities, and to trust to those blessed promises
which were given from the foundation of the world."

Indeed, there is a fervor in his feeling which pushes him into such
extravagances of expression as the Doctor would have found it necessary
to qualify, if Adele, poor child, had not been by far too weak for their
comprehension.

The Brindlocks were, of course, utterly am