s whose one single engrossing thought is their own welfare,--in the
next world, it is true, but still their own personal welfare. The Roman
Church recognizes this class, and provides every form of specific to
meet their spiritual condition. But in so far as Protestantism
has thrown out works as a means of insuring future safety, these
unfortunates are as badly off as nervous patients who have no drops,
pills, potions, no doctors' rules, to follow. Only tell a poor creature
what to do, and he or she will do it, and be made easy, were it a
pilgrimage of a thousand miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of
boiled ones; but if once assured that doing does no good, the drooping
Little-faiths are left at leisure to worry about their souls, as
the other class of weaklings worry about their bodies. The effect
on character does not seem to be very different in the two classes.
Metaphysicians may discuss the nature of selfishness at their leisure;
if to have all her thoughts centring on the one point of her own
well-being by and by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely
selfish; and if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more
than ten of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by
turning to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the
twenty-fourth verse.

The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not work
kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary, developed a
mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which threatened to end in
utter lawlessness. Miss Silence started from the approved doctrine,
that all children are radically and utterly wrong in all their motives,
feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as they remain subject to their
natural instincts. It was by the eradication, and not the education, of
these instincts, that the character of the human being she was moulding
was to be determined. The first great preliminary process, so soon
as the child manifested any evidence of intelligent and persistent
self-determination, was to break her will.

There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the
teaching of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder
nature than his own to carry out many of his dogmas to their practical
application. He wrought in the pure mathematics, so to speak, of
theology, and left the working rules to the good sense an