and the prayer together: Lord, I believe: help Thou mine unbelief.'

The next morning Thorndale and Cyril were to have breakfasted together. But when Thorndale went to his lodgings, he was gone, without a word; and they met no more till they met in the Cistercian monastery.

After this meeting, Cyril sometimes visited Thorndale at the Villa Scarpa. Thorndale did not seek any account of the process by which the youth who could believe nothing, had passed into the monk who believed everything. No doubt it would have been the usual story of reaction commenced, and then a positive appetite for belief growing upon the mind. In any case, belief had brought Cyril peace and rest. And the doctrine of purgatory had been to him a favourable distinction of the Church of Rome. It represented a reformatory nature even in punishment beyond the grave; and the young enthusiast fancied that a special revelation had been vouchsafed to him by the Saviour, that every soul that God has made should in some way be saved at last. And coming not frequently, stealing quietly up to the terrace with his pax vobiscum, Cyril visited Thorndale to the last. But Thorndale saw the Cistercian on the strip of beach no more.

Cyril had felt the difficulty which most thoughtful men must feel, as to what conception should be formed of God :—

How personify the Infinite? I said to myself. Does not the notion of personality itself imply contrast, limitation, and must not a person be therefore Finite? or how personify at all, but by borrowing from the creature, and framing an ideal out of human qualities?

At one moment my conception of God seemed grand and distinct, and my whole soul was filled and satisfied with it. Suddenly I was startled and abashed when I traced in it too plainly the features of humanity. These I hastened to obliterate; and the whole image was then fading into terrible obscurity. I remember one day our common friend Luxmore saying, in his wild poetic manner, that the ordinary imagination of God was but the shadow of a man thrown upwards-the image of our best and greatest, seen larger on the concave of the sky.

We remark upon this, that Luxmore, after all, was only stating in a poetical and somewhat exaggerated form, a great and fundamental religious truth. We are 'created in the image of God:' and it is only because there is something in us which resembles God, that we are able to form any conception of Him and His character. But for this we could no more conceive of God's attributes than a blind man, who never saw, can conceive of colour. We, of course, are fallen creatures; and our blurred and blotted qualities bear only the faintest and farthest likeness to that Divine Image in which we were made. And further, it is true enough that when we kneel down to pray, we should only distract and dishearten ourselves by trying to form a conception of a Being in whose nature there are such elements as eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, invisibility; and by trying to feel that we are addressing Him. But was Luxmore entirely wrong when he said that the Hearer of prayer, to our weak minds, draws personality from a sublimed humanity? It is not a fable, that we know the picture of a man's character and life set out in a certain simple story, Glad Tidings to all to whom it comes: a man towards whom we can

feel kindly sympathy and warm affection: a human being like ourselves: and we are told that He is ‘the image of the invisible God:' that when we picture Him to our hearts, we picture God-softened, but not degraded. We can see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ:' and in praying to God, we can feel as though the kind face were bent over us as we pray, as though we were telling of our wants and sorrows to that kind and gentle heart. Do we desire to think clearly to whom we speak when we pray ? We are chilled and overwhelmed when we think of infinite and infinite time: it is not to an aggrespace gate of such qualities as these that we can address heartfelt pleading. Let us think we are speaking to a sympathising Man; and child-like, we can bend down our head upon the knee of Jesus of Nazareth, and breathe into his ear the story of our wants and woes. We have all that the grossest idolatry ever gave of clear conception; and yet our worship is not degraded, but sublimed.

Not so pleasing is the Fourth Book of Thorndale's manuscript, entitled Seckendorf, or the Spirit of Denial. Long ago, in Switzerland, Thorndale found Seckendorf in the studio of Clarence, the Utopian artist. Seckendorf was a tall man, with grey hair and keen grey eyes, and advanced in years. He was by birth a German baron; but he was known in England as Doctor Seckendorf, an eminent physician and physiologist. In philosophy, he was just the opposite of Clarence sceptical, sarcastic, hoping nothing. His philosophy was firm as a rock, and as hard and

barren.' He held that what is excellent never can be common, because higher excellence is greater complication, and its manifestation must be more restricted, because a larger number of antecedent conditions are necessary for that manifestation.' The Utopian's ' good time coming' of universal goodness and happiness could therefore never be. And Thorndale thought out a sad induction of facts in corroboration of the thing:

There is more sea than land; three-fourths of the globe are covered with salt water.

There is more barren land than fertile; much is sheer desert, or hopeless swamp; great part wild arid steppes, or land that can only be held in cultivation by incessant toil.

Where nature is most prolific, there is more weed and jungle than fruit and flower.

Of the animal creation, the lowest orders are by far the most numerous. The infusoria, and other creatures that seem to enjoy no other sensations than what are immediately connected with food and movement (if even these), far surpass all others in this respect. The tribes of insects are innumerable; the mammalia comparatively few.

Of the human inhabitants of the earth, the ethnologist tells us that the Mongolian race is the most numerous, which is not certainly the race in which the noblest forms of civilisation have appeared. As in the tree there is more leaf than fruit, so in the most advanced nation of Europe there are more poor than rich, more ignorant than wise, more automatic labourers, the mere creatures of habit, than reasoning and reflective men.

We do not know whether the celebrated anonymous work, entitled The Plurality of Worlds, was published before Thorndale's death. If he had read it, he might have gathered from its eloquent and startling pages one

instance more for his induction. He might have stated that there seems strong reason to believe that of all the orbs which have (if we may say so) blossomed in immensity, only one has arrived at fruit: that this earth is the only inhabited world in all the universe. The Creator works with a lavish hand. But as his works grow nobler, they grow fewer. Scarcity, we all know, makes a thing more valuable: the converse holds as truly, that value makes a thing scarce.

The second chapter in this Fourth Book treats ingeniously and strikingly of the power of money, and also furnishes proof that Thorndale, like many men of his make, was not minutely accurate. The chapter is called The Silver Shilling, and over and over again we have the silver shilling repeated, as the type of money. Seckendorf tells us where he got the name; it was from a poem by one Phillips, "On the Silver Shilling.' We know, of course, what Seckendorf is referring to; but there is no such poem as that he quotes. Most men who are tolerably well read in the poetry of the seventeenth century, have at least heard of John Phillips's poem, The Splendid Shilling, an amusing parody of the style of Milton: it sets out thus:

Happy the man, who, void of care and strife,
In silken or in leathern purse, retains

A Splendid Shilling: he nor hears with pain,
New oysters cried, nor sighs for cheerful ale.

Our shortening space forbids our offering our readers any account of Seckendorf's career, which Mr. Smith sketches with great liveliness and interest; or our