ctions to be detached
from the world. That must produce deadness of feeling."

"My Lord, there is such a thing as being alive from the dead. That is
what God requires. If we tarry at the dying, we shall stop short of His
perfection. We are to be dead to sin; but I nowhere find in Scripture
that we are to die to love and happiness. That is man's gloss upon
God's precept."

"Is that what you teach in your valleys?"

"We teach God's Word," said the Vaudois Prior. "Alas! for the men that
have made it void through their tradition! `If they speak not according
thereunto, it is because there is no light in them.'"

"And you learn--" suggested the Earl in a more interested tone.

"We learn that God requires of His servants that they shall overcome the
world; and He has told us what He means by the world--`The lust of the
flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.' Whatever has
become that to me, that am I to overcome, if I would reign with Christ
when He cometh."

We Protestants can hardly understand the fearful extent to which Rome
binds the souls of her votaries. When she goes so far--which she rarely
does--as to hold out God's Word with one hand, she carries in the other
an antidote to it which she calls the interpretation of the Church,
derived from the consent of the Fathers. That the Fathers scarcely ever
consent to anything does not trouble her. According to this
interpretation, all human affection comes for monk or nun under the head
of the lusts of the flesh. [Note 3.] A daughter's love for her mother,
a father's for his child, is thus branded. From his cradle Earl Edmund
had been taught this; was it any marvel if he found it impossible to get
rid of the idea? The Prior's eyes were less blinded. He had come
straight from those Piedmontese valleys where, from time immemorial, the
Word of God has not been bound, and whosoever would has been free to
slake his thirst at the pure fountain of the water of life. Love was
not dead in his heart, and he was not ashamed of it.

"But then, Father, you must reckon all love a thing to be left behind?"
very naturally queried the Earl.

"It will not be so in Heaven," answered the Prior; "then why should it
be on earth? Left behind! Think you I left behind me the one love of
my life when I became a Bonus Homo? I trow not. My Lord, forty years
ago this summer, I was a young man, just entering life, and betrothed to
a maiden of the Val Pellice.