Mrs. Elton read prayers morning and evening; —­ very elaborate compositions, which would have instructed the apostles themselves in many things they had never anticipated.  But, unfortunately, Mrs. Elton must likewise read certain remarks, in the form of a homily, intended to impress the scripture which preceded it upon the minds of the listeners.  Between the mortar of the homilist’s faith, and the dull blows of the pestle of his arrogance, the fair form of truth was ground into the powder of pious small talk.  This result was not pleasant either to Harry or to Euphra.  Euphra, with her life threatening to go to ruin about her, was crying out for him who made the soul of man, “who loved us into being,"2 and who alone can renew the life of his children; and in such words as those a scoffing demon seemed to mock at her needs.  Harry had the natural dislike of all childlike natures to everything formal, exclusive, and unjust.  But, having received nothing of what is commonly called a religious training, this advantage resulted from his new experiences in Mrs. Elton’s family, that a good direction was given to his thoughts by the dislike which he felt to such utterances.  More than this:  a horror fell upon him lest these things should be true; lest the mighty All of nature should be only a mechanism, without expression and without beauty; lest the God who made us should be like us only in this, that he too was selfish and mean and proud; lest his ideas should resemble those that inhabit the brain of a retired money-maker, or of an arbitrary monarch claiming a divine right —­ instead of towering as the heavens over the earth, above the loftiest moods of highest poet, most generous child, or most devoted mother.  I do not mean that these thoughts took these shapes in Harry’s mind; but that his feelings were such as might have been condensed into such thoughts, had his intellect been more mature.

One morning, the passage of scripture which Mrs. Elton read was the story of the young man who came to Jesus, and went away sorrowful, because the Lord thought so well of him, and loved him so heartily, that he wanted to set him free from his riches.  A great portion of the homily was occupied with proving that the evangelist could not possibly mean that Jesus loved the young man in any pregnant sense of the word; but merely meant that Jesus “felt kindly disposed towards him” —­ felt a poor little human interest in him, in fact, and did not love him divinely at all.

Harry’s face was in a flame all the time she was reading.  When the service was over —­ and a bond service it was for Euphra and him —­ they left the room together.  As soon as the door was shut, he burst out: 

“I say, Euphra!  Wasn’t that a shame?  They would have Jesus as bad as themselves.  We shall have somebody writing a book next to prove that after all Jesus was a Pharisee.”

“Never mind,” said the heart-sore, sceptical Euphra; “never mind, Harry; it’s all nonsense.”