-assent, practical Atheism,
sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake? Will you,
like the rest of this wise world, let a man's spirit rot asleep into
the pit, if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth
respectabilities; but if he dares, in waking, to yawn in an
unorthodox manner, knock him on the head at once, and "break the
bruised reed," and "quench the smoking flax"? And yet you
churchgoers have "renounced the world"!'

'What do you want, in Heaven's name?' asked Argemone, half
terrified.

'I want YOU to tell me that. Here I am, with youth, health,
strength, money, every blessing of life but one; and I am utterly
miserable. I want some one to tell me what I want.'

'Is it not that you want--religion?'

'I see hundreds who have what you call religion, with whom I should
scorn to change my irreligion.'

'But, Mr. Smith, are you not--are you not wicked?--They tell me so,'
said Argemone, with an effort, 'And is that not the cause of your
disease?'

Lancelot laughed.

'No, fairest prophetess, it is the disease itself. "Why am I what I
am, when I know more and more daily what I could be?"--That is the
mystery; and my sins are the fruit, and not the root of it. Who
will explain that?'

Argemone began,--

'The Church--'

'Oh, Miss Lavington,' cried he, impatiently, 'will you, too, send me
back to that cold abstraction? I came to you, however presumptuous,
for living, human advice to a living, human heart; and will you pass
off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man's mouth
has a different meaning? In one book, meaning a method of
education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system
of polity,--only it has never been realised;--now a set of words
written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of
men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and
apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most
exclusive of all parties. Really, before you ask me to hear the
Church, I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.'

'Our Articles define it,' said Argemone drily.

'The "Visible Church," at least, it defines as "a company of
faithful men, in which," etc. But how does it define the
"Invisible" one? And what does "faithful" mean? What if I thought
Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their
way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the