rch system!
How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day, every
thought for you! But I cannot explain myself. Why not go to our
vicar and open your doubts to him?'

'Pardon, but you must excuse me.'

'Why? He is one of the saintliest of men!'

'To tell the truth, I have been to him already.'

'You do not mean it! And what did he tell you?'

'What the rest of the world does--hearsays.'

'But did you not find him most kind?'

'I went to him to be comforted and guided. He received me as a
criminal. He told me that my first duty was penitence; that as long
as I lived the life I did, he could not dare to cast his pearls
before swine by answering my doubts; that I was in a state incapable
of appreciating spiritual truths; and, therefore, he had no right to
tell me any.'

'And what did he tell you?'

'Several spiritual lies instead, I thought. He told me, hearing me
quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all
Pantheists at heart. I asked him whether he included Lange and
Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his
life. He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all
he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly. He
called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist. I should have burst out at
that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day
before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood
which he was retailing. Whenever I feebly interposed an objection
to anything he said (for, after all, he talked on), he told me to
hear the Catholic Church. I asked him which Catholic Church? He
said the English. I asked him whether it was to be the Church of
the sixth century, or the thirteenth, or the seventeenth or the
eighteenth? He told me the one and eternal Church which belonged as
much to the nineteenth century as to the first. I begged to know
whether, then, I was to hear the Church according to Simeon, or
according to Newman, or according to St. Paul; for they seemed to me
a little at variance? He told me, austerely enough, that the mind
of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles. To which I
answered, that the mind of the episcopal clergy might, perhaps, be;
but, then, how happened it that they were always quarrelling and
calling hard names about the sense of those very documents? And so
I left him, assuring him that, living in the nineteenth century, I
wanted