“Alas! my child, it is but too true.  So long as you are out of Christ you are as a viper, and worse than a viper, in his sight.”

By and by, Mrs. Edwards, one of the loveliest of women and sweetest of mothers, comes into the nursery.  The child is crying.

“What is the matter, my darling?”

“Papa has been telling me that God hates me worse than a snake.”

Poor, gentle, poetical, sensitive, spiritual, almost celestial Mrs. Jonathan Edwards!  On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived, written down, given to the press, by the child’s father; on the other side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother pleading in her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered husband.  Do you suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender soul of her darling?  Would it have been moral parricide for a son of the great divine to have repudiated the doctrine which degraded his blameless infancy to the condition and below the condition of the reptile?  Was it parricide in the second or third degree when his descendant struck out that venomous sentence from the page in which it stood as a monument to what depth Christian heathenism could sink under the teaching of the great master of logic and spiritual inhumanity?  It is too late to be angry about the abuse a well—­meaning writer received thirty years ago.  The whole atmosphere has changed since then.  It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own.  The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son’s age.

So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants.  They have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust.  Confession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,—­these all inspire a confidence which without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive natures.  They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends, and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture.  It is no wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence.  To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae, of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place.  If Cowper had been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled by a Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing, looking upon himself as a castaway.  I have seen a good many Roman Catholics on their dying beds, and it always appeared to me that they accepted the inevitable with a composure which showed that their belief, whether or not the best to live by, was a better one to die by than most of the harder creeds which have replaced it.