udience.

When Mr. White's three months had expired, there came another pastor, as
different from him as possible. Mr. Lurton was as gentle as his
predecessor had been boisterous. There was a strong substratum of manly
courage and will, but the whole was overlaid with a sweetness wholly
feminine and seraphic. His religion was the Twenty-third Psalm. His face
showed no trace of conflict. He had accepted the creed which he had
inherited without a question, and, finding in it abundant sources of
happiness, of moral development, and spiritual consolation, he thence
concluded it true. He had never doubted. It is a question whether his
devout soul would not have found peace and edification in any set of
opinions to which he had happened to be born. You have seen one or two
such men in your life. Their presence is a benison. Albert felt more
peaceful while Mr. Lurton stood without the grating of his cell, and
Lurton seemed to leave a benediction behind him. He did not talk in pious
cant, he did not display his piety, and he never addressed a sinner down
an inclined plane. He was too humble for that. But the settled, the
unruffled, the unruffleable peacefulness and trustfulness of his soul
seemed to Charlton, whose life had been stormier within than without,
nothing less than sublime. The inmates of the prison could not appreciate
this delicate quality in the young minister. Lurton had never lived near
enough to their life for them to understand him or for him to understand
them. He considered them all, on general principles, as lost sinners,
bad, like himself, by nature, who had superadded outward transgressions
and the crime of rejecting Christ to their original guilt and corruption
as members of the human family.

Charlton watched Lurton with intense interest, listened to all he had to
say, responded to the influence of his fine quality, but found his own
doubts yet unanswered and indeed untouched. The minister, on his part,
took a lively interest in the remarkable young man, and often endeavored
to remove his doubts by the well-knit logical arguments he had learned in
the schools.

"Mr. Lurton," said Charlton impatiently one day, "were you ever troubled
with doubt?"

"I do not remember that I ever seriously entertained a doubt in regard to
religious truth in my life," said Lurton, after reflection.

"Then you know no more about my doubts than a blind man knows of your
sense of sight." But after a pause, he added, laugh