because we have hitherto found no device by which to turn them from their purpose. Such being the state of the case," continued Mr. Fitz-Adam, "having consulted my friends, we have been inclined to adopt a new system, which has been in preparation and in action for some months past, though not so fully as we trust it will be in the sequel."

"You mean," returned Father Peter, "your system of liberality and universal toleration, than which a more accursed system never entered the brain of man. I tell you, Mr. Steward, that mildness never has answered, and never will answer with these headstrong gentry. What has awakened this spirit of rebellion among the people, but the relaxation of discipline? What have the ignoble vulgar to do, to think for themselves? From what proceeds this spirit which has been awakened among the servants, but from the schools of which you speak, and from which, with all the boasted influence of Madame le Monde, you have not been able to exclude the Lord's letters, entirely in opposition to my advice and counsel ?"

"I tell you," said the steward, "that there is a necessity to bend and accommodate to the times. You attribute those results to our places of education, which had taken effect before the doctor had even thought of these seminaries for the rabble. Who or what awakened that spirit by which you were shaken in your seat of authority, and the old chaplain restored, as it were by force to his place, and required to read the letters in the hearing of the servants? I say, who awakened that spirit, Father Peter ?"

"It was when that spirit was first excited, that you should have exerted yourself, Mr. Fitz-Adam," said the father; "and had you then listened to me, I should not have experienced that change of circumstances which I now have daily reason to deplore.† For, oh! how fallen,

"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it." ¡John viii. 44.

"Thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! ...Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.

how changed is my condition. When I compare the present with the past, and consider how it once was with me, when my will was even a law with you, Mr. Fitz-Adam, and when Madame le Monde bowed to my nod, I certainly cannot but weep, and lament, and expostulate against every change which renders my hope more distant."

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"Your hope!" returned Mr. Fitz-Adam, well, at least you must acknowledge that you have had your day; and also that if the party of him whom some call Master should entirely prevail, you would be worse off than you are now; for I tell you that they meditate little else but ousting you altogether."

"Mr. Fitz-Adam," returned the father, angrily, "he to whom you refer, as being falsely called Master, is the person from whom I receive my authority, and of whom I am the vicar and delegate in this house, and' whose seat I occupy in the midst of the people ;* and it is in his name, and with his prerogatives, that I rule; and him that disputes my authority I pronounce accursed."

"So you made many of us believe, in the time that is passed," replied the steward," and truly at one time I found it hard myself to resist your claims: and you know perfectly well that this is the point on which you and I quarrelled. You did assuredly at one time take strange state upon yourself, and lorded it over the house far more than was agreeable to me; pretending that I received my authority from you, and even interfering with what I should eat, and what I should drink."†

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?" Isaiah xiv. 4, 11-17.

"Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord God, Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a god, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God." Ezek. xxviii. 2.

"Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats

"And if I did so,” replied the Father Peter, "did I promise you nothing in return for your submission? Did I not undertake to stand between you and the Master, and to keep the peace for you-insomuch that while you held to me and were as it were under my protection, you were at liberty to please yourself, and to enjoy your good things with Madame le Monde, and to solace yourself with the damsels her daughters, without any dread of being called to account at any future time. Now I ask you what promise or prospect of this sort does the doctor hold out to you. Does he presume to stand between you and the Master, or to supply you with any means short of implicit obedience by which you can avoid that reckoning, which, let me tell you, Mr. Steward, will make you and Madame le Monde look about you, come when it will, and no one knows how soon it may come ?"

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Well," said the steward, "let every man look to himself in that great day. As to the doctor's opinions respecting it, I never comprehended them rightly, inasmuch as he contradicts himself whenever he speaks upon the subject, sometimes upholding one thing and sometimes another; sometimes maintaining that we are all to be called over the coals and punished for ever for the smallest fault, and then saying that those who love the Master, are just for party's sake to be forgiven every thing: with other such contradictory stuff which is hardly worth repeating. But the thing I like least in the doctor is this, that with all his show of humility, he is full as ready to take any advantage in advancing his own influence in the house as ever you were, Father Peter. I am fully aware that circumstances do not allow me to resist him openly, and to put him down with his followers, as it were with fire and fagot; otherwise I promise you I should soon quash this foolish plan of his for disseminating the Lord's letters. But not having that power, I have had recourse to other measures. I have con

sulted the librarian, a man who is in better possession of the popular opinion than any one in the house, and

which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer." 1 Tim. iv. 3-5.

he has undertaken to slip in a word or two into the letters, which may alter the sense in very important particulars, without being observed by the doctor and his party, or which may bear an argument if observed; for as you well know, Father Peter, the original manuscripts are somewhat obsolete, and it may be well believed that some of the words may bear various constructions."

"Various and very false constructions have already been placed on many passages by the secretary," replied the father," and the doctor has adopted these erroneous copies. If I could prevail to have the copies which are disseminating taken from my manuscript, which is the only authentic one, I should have less objection to the doctor's plan than I now have."

"Well," replied Mr. Fitz-Adam, "I have no doubt but that I shall be able to incline the doctor to allow your party to have your own copies; and with the address of the librarian, on which I greatly depend, I trust that we shall be able so effectually to clog the wheels of this great machine which the chaplain is erecting, that little else will proceed from it than clatter and confusion. But the doctor loves a noise of his own making; and if there is rattle enough, he will not presently find out that the hammers do not strike where he would have them; he is not half so wise in his generation as you were, my good father. Only conceive what the old fool said to me the other day. I had affronted him, I suppose, for he was very hot and angry; and he told me as much as that I was utterly vile, and that I had not power to obey the Lord's commandments in a manner acceptable to him, that it is in my very nature to resist them, that I cannot do well even if I try,* and that it is useless for me or any such as I to make the attempt; and then the next moment he turned upon me with his exhortations and preachments, all of which tended to prove that if I did not do what he said I could not do, I should assuredly be cast into a dungeon, from which I never must expect to be set free. Now as you remarked before, although

"So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God." Rom. viii. 8. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." Gal. v. 17.

"For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in

you did take state on yourself in your day, and was troublesome enough in consequence to me, yet you were by no means so worrying as this fool of a fellow is. You were not always dinning these strange contradictions in my ears, which, supposing them to be true, only go to prove that their boasted lord is what he says of himself, a hard master."*

"And so he is," replied the Father Peter, "to those who will not accept the salvation which is offered to them; and the conditions of which are constantly tendered to them by me, who am, as I before said, the vicegerent of the Lord in this place."

"As you say," replied Mr. Fitz-Adam, " and as I once believed, to my comfort and consolation, and I almost wish that I could believe you still, my good fellow; for truly your doctrines were comfortable to flesh and blood, savoury and relishing to the senses. But the librarian has entirely destroyed that illusion, not only in my mind, but in that of the larger part of those whom you counted among your followers in the house; so much so, my good father, that I verily believe that many of those even who fill the best places under you, would cut off their badges, if they did not find it their interest to keep them on."

"The librarian," returned the father, "is therefore to be accounted as among the accursed."

"And the more so," said the steward, laughing, "because, if I remember right, he was nursed and reared in your apartments."

"Beshrew you," replied the father, "he was no nursling of mine."

"Well then," returned the steward, "fame must be set down as a liar; and not for the first time, for this librarian is not the eldest of your hopeful progeny according to her but he is a son, Father Peter, whom you need not be ashamed of, and you will do well to close in with him in the measures we now propose, for he is the rising sun of the house, I can tell you, and not one to be lightly

all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." Gal. iii. 10.

"Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strewed." Matt.

XXV. 24.