of late years, feeling himself growing old, and realising that every day brought him nearer to that verge which all must cross in passing from Time into Eternity, he had been sorely troubled in mind.  He was wise with the wisdom which comes of deep reading, lonely meditation, and fervent study,—­he had instructed himself in the modern schools of thought as well as the ancient,—­and though his own soul was steadfastly set upon the faith he followed, he was compassionately aware of a strange and growing confusion in the world,—­a combination of the elements of evil, which threatened, or seemed to threaten, some terrible and imminent disaster.  This sorrowful foreboding had for a long time preyed upon him, physically as well as mentally; always thin, he had grown thinner and more careworn, till at the beginning of the year his health had threatened to break down altogether.  Whereupon those who loved him, growing alarmed, summoned a physician, who, (with that sage experience of doctors to whom thought-trouble is an inexplicable and incurable complication) at once pronounced change of air to be absolutely necessary.  Cardinal Bonpre must travel, he said, and seek rest and minddistraction in the contemplation of new and varying scenes.  With smiling and resigned patience the Cardinal obeyed not so much the command of his medical attendant, as the anxious desire of his people,—­and thereupon departed from his own Cathedral-town on a tour of several months, during which time he inwardly resolved to try and probe for himself the truth of how the world was going,—­ whether on the downward road to destruction and death, or up the high ascents of progress and life.  He went alone and unattended,—­he had arranged to meet his niece in Paris and accompany her to her father’s house in Rome,—­and he was on his way to Paris now.  But he had purposely made a long and round-about journey through France with the intention of studying the religious condition of the people; and by the time he reached Rouen, the old sickness at his heart had rather increased than diminished.  The confusion and the trouble of the world were not mere hearsay,—­they in very truth existed.  And what seemed to the Cardinal to be the chief cause of the general bewilderment of things, was the growing lack of faith in God and a Hereafter.  How came this lack of faith into the Christian world?  Sorrowfully he considered the question,—­and persistently the same answer always asserted itself—­that the blame rested principally with the Church itself, and its teachers and preachers, and not only in one, but in all forms of Creed.

“We have erred in some vital manner,” mused the Cardinal, with a feeling of strange personal contrition, as though he were more to blame than any of his compeers—­“We have failed to follow the Master’s teaching in its true perfection.  We have planted in ourselves a seed of corruption, and we have permitted—­nay, some of us have encouraged—­its poisonous growth, till it now threatens to contaminate the whole field of labour.”