hand, the vice existing among certain classes, both of the rich and poor, in London, Paris, and Vienna, could have been conceived by a Spartan or Roman of the heroic ages only as possible in a Tartarus, where fiends were employed to teach, but not to punish, crime.  It little becomes us to speak contemptuously of the religion of races to whom we stand in such relations; nor do I think any man of modesty or thoughtfulness will ever speak so of any religion, in which God has allowed one good man to die, trusting.

The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become:  and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so.  There may be doubt of the meaning of other visions, but there is none respecting that of the dream of St. Peter; and you may trust the Rock of the Church’s Foundation for true interpreting, when he learned from it that, “in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.”  See that you understand what that righteousness means; and set hand to it stoutly:  you will always measure your neighbors’ creed kindly, in proportion to the substantial fruits of your own.  Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter into the faith of others, and to sympathize, in imagination, with the guiding principles of their lives.  So only can you justly love them, or pity them, or praise.  By the gracious effort you will double, treble—­nay, indefinitely multiply, at once the pleasure, the reverence, and the intelligence with which you read:  and, believe me, it is wiser and holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves, through the gathering darkness, and communicable cold.

Mary (after some pause).  We shall all like reading Greek history so much better after this! but it has put everything else out of our heads that we wanted to ask.

L. I can tell you one of the things; and I might take credit for generosity in telling you; but I have a personal reason—­Lucilla’s verse about the creation.

Dora.  Oh, yes—­yes; and its “pain together, until now.”

L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old error of my own.  Somewhere in the fourth volume of “Modern Painters,” I said that the earth seemed to have passed through its highest state:  and that, after ascending by a series of phases, culminating in its habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually becoming less fit for that habitation.

Mary.  Yes, I remember.