is a worse murderer than he who stabs us bodily to death; for he has tainted our soul; he has pushed us back many steps on our journey Godward, and has made us wonder and question whether in truth a God can exist who tolerates in His universe such a living lie!  It is only when we have to contemplate a broken faith that we doubt God!  For a broken faith is an abnormal prodigy in the natural scheme of the universe—­a discord in the eternal music of the stars!  There are no treacheries, no falsifying of accounts, in the Divine order of the Law.  The sun does not fail to rise each morning, whether clouds obscure the sky or not,—­the moon appears at her stated seasons and performs her silver-footed pilgrimage faithfully to time—­the stars move with precision in their courses,—­and so true are they to their ordainment, that we are able to predict the manner in which they will group themselves and shine, years after we have passed away.  In the world of Nature the leaves bud, and the birds nest at the coming of Spring; the roses bloom in Summer—­the harvest is gathered in Autumn,—­the whole marvellous system moves like a grand timepiece whose hands are never awry, whose chimes never fail to ring the exact hour,—­and in all the splendour of God’s gifts to us there is no such thing as a broken faith!  Only we,—­we, the creatures He has endowed with ’His own image,’—­Free-will,—­break our faith with Him and with each other.  And so we come to mischief, inasmuch as broken faith is no part of God’s Intention.  And when two persons, man and woman, swear to be true to each other before God, so long as life shall last, and afterwards break that vow, confusion and chaos result from their perjury, and all the pestilential furies attending on a wrong deed whip them to their graves!  In these times of ours, when wars and rumours of wars shake the lethargic souls of too-exultant politicians and statesmen with anxiety for themselves if not for their country, we hear every day of men and women breaking their marriage vows as lightly as though God were not existent,—­we read of princes whose low amours are a disgrace to the world—­of dukes and earls who tolerate the unchastity of their wives in order that they themselves may have the more freedom,—­of men of title and position who even sell their wives to their friends in order to secure some much-needed cash or social advantage,—­and while our law is busy night and day covering up ‘aristocratic’ crimes from publicity, and showing forth the far smaller sins of hard-working poverty, God’s law is at work in a totally different way.  The human judge may excuse a king’s vices,—­but before God there are neither kings nor commoners, and punishment falls where it is due!  Christ taught us that the greatest crime is treachery, for of Judas He said ‘it were better for that man that he had never been born,’ and for the traitor and perjurer death is not the end, but the beginning, of evils.  Against the man who accepts the life of a woman given