In loving Him, he and Paula were one, he knew, though they had not the same idea of His nature.

Orion, as he meditated, thought out the points on which her views deviated from his own:  she believed that the divine and the human natures were distinct in the person of Christ.  And as he reflected on this creed, till now so horrible in his eyes, he felt that the unique individuality of the Saviour, shedding forth love and truth, came home to him more closely when he pictured Him perfect and spotless, yet feeling as a man; walking among men with all their joy in life in His heart, alive to every pang and sorrow which can torture mortals, rejoicing with them, and taking upon Himself unspeakable humiliation, suffering, and death, with a stricken, bleeding, and yet self-devoting heart, for pure love of the wretched race to which He could stoop from His glory.  Yes, this Christ could be his Redeemer too.  The Almighty Lord had become his perfect and most loving friend, his glorious, but lenient and tender brother, to whom he could gladly give his whole heart, who understood everything, who was ready to forgive everything—­even all that was seething in his aching heart which longed for purification—­and all because He once had suffered as a man suffers.

For the first time he, the Jacobite, dared to confess so much to himself; and not solely for Paula’s sake.  A violent clanging on a cracked metal plate roused him from his meditations by its harsh clamor; the sacrament of the Last Supper was about to be administered:  the invariable conclusion of the Jacobite service.  The bishop came forth from behind the screen of the inner sanctuary, poured some wine into a silver cup and crumbled into it two little cakes stamped with the Coptic cross.  Of this mixture he first partook, and then gave it in a spoon to each member of the congregation who came up to receive it.  Orion approached after two elders of the Church.  Finally the priest rinsed out the cup, and drained the very washings, that no drop of the saving liquid should be lost.

How high had Orion’s heart throbbed when, as a youth, he had been admitted for the first time to this most sacred of all Christian privileges!  He was instructed in its deep and glorious symbolism, and had often felt the purifying, saving, and refreshing effect of the sacrament, strengthening him in all goodness, when he had partaken of it with his parents and brothers.  Hand-in-hand, they had gone home feeling as if newly robed in body and soul and more closely bound together than before.  And to-day, insensible as he was to the repulsiveness of the forms of worship of his confession he felt as though the bread and wine—­the Flesh and Blood of the Saviour—­had sealed the bond he had silently entered into with himself; as though the Lord had put forth an invisible hand to remove the guilt and the curse that crushed him so sorely.  Deep devotion fell on his soul:  his future life, he thought, should bring him nearer to God than ever before, and be spent in loving, and in the more earnest, full, and laborious exercise of the gifts Heaven had bestowed on him.