is only a way of speaking;
and I'm only a woman that is speaking to you for your good. Tell me--we
are not in church, tied up by stait-laced rules to keep men and women
from getting within arm's-length of one another's souls--tell me, who
saw those two lost children?"

"I, I, I, I, I," roared several voices in reply.

"Is it true, as a good woman tells me, that the innocent darlings had
each an arm round the other's neck?"

"Ay."

"And little coronets of flowers, to match their hair?" (That was the
girl's doing.)

"Ay."

"And the little boy had played the man, and taken off his tippet to put
round the little lady?"

"Ay!" with a burst of enthusiasm from the assembled rustics.

"I think I see them myself; and the torches lighting up the dewy leaves
overhead, and that Divine picture of innocent love. Well, which was the
prettiest sight, and the fittest for heaven--the hatred of the parents,
or the affection of the children?

"And now mark what a weapon hatred is, in the Devil's hands. There are
only two people in this parish on whom that sight was wasted; and those
two being gentlemen, and men of education, would have been more
affected by it than humble folk, if Hell had not been in their hearts,
for Hate comes from Hell, and takes men down to the place it comes
from.

"Do you, then, shun, in that one thing, the example of your betters:
and I hope those children will shun it too. A father is to be treated
with great veneration, but above all is our Heavenly Father and His
law; and that law, what is it?--what has it been this eighteen hundred
years and more? Why, Love.

"Would you be happy in this world, and fit your souls to dwell
hereafter even in the meanest of the many mansions prepared above, you
_must,_ above all things, be charitable. You must not run your neighbor
down behind his back, or God will hate you: you must not wound him to
his face, or God will hate you. You must overlook a fault or two, and
see a man's bright side, and then God will love you. If you won't do
that much for your neighbor, why, in Heaven's name, should God overlook
a multitude of sins in you?

"Nothing goes to heaven surer than Charity, and nothing is so fit to
sit in heaven. St. Paul had many things to be proud of and to praise in
himself--things that the world is more apt to admire than Christian
charity, the sweetest, but humblest of all the Christian graces: St.
Paul, I say, was a bulwark of learning, an anchor of fait