f low drinking-songs, ghastly as the laughter
of lost spirits in the pit, mingled with the feeble wailings of some
child of shame. The vicar recollected how he had seen the same
sight at the door of Kensington Workhouse, walking home one night in
company with Luke Smith; and how, too, he had commented to him on
that fearful sign of the times, and had somewhat unfairly drawn a
contrast between the niggard cruelty of 'popular Protestantism,' and
the fancied 'liberality of the middle age.' What wonder if his
pupil had taken him at his word?

Delighted to escape from his own thoughts by anything like action,
he pulled out his purse to give an alms. There was no silver in it,
but only some fifteen or twenty sovereigns, which he that day
received as payment for some bitter reviews in a leading religious
periodical. Everything that night seemed to shame and confound him
more. As he touched the money, there sprang up in his mind in an
instant the thought of the articles which had procured it; by one of
those terrible, searching inspirations, in which the light which
lighteth every man awakes as a lightning-flash of judgment, he saw
them, and his own heart, for one moment, as they were;--their blind
prejudice; their reckless imputations of motives; their wilful
concealment of any palliating clauses; their party nicknames, given
without a shudder at the terrible accusations which they conveyed.
And then the indignation, the shame, the reciprocal bitterness which
those articles would excite, tearing still wider the bleeding wounds
of that Church which they professed to defend! And then, in this
case, too, the thought rushed across him, 'What if I should have
been wrong and my adversary right? What if I have made the heart of
the righteous sad whom God has not made sad? I! to have been
dealing out Heaven's thunders, as if I were infallible! I! who am
certain at this moment of no fact in heaven or earth, except my own
untruth! God! who am I that I should judge another?' And the coins
seemed to him like the price of blood--he fancied that he felt them
red-hot to his hand, and, in his eagerness to get rid of the
accursed thing, he dealt it away fiercely to the astonished group,
amid whining and flattery, wrangling and ribaldry; and then, not
daring to wait and see the use to which his money would be put,
hurried off to the inn, and tried in uneasy slumbers to forget the
time, until the