Dorothy—­a wonderful name, the gift of god, to be so treated, faring in this, however, like many other of God’s gifts—­Dorothy Oldcastle was the eldest daughter of Jeremy and Sibyl Oldcastle, and the sister therefore of Ethelwyn.  Her father, who was an easy-going man, entirely under the dominion of his wife, died when she was about fifteen, and her mother sent her to school, with especial recommendation to the care of a clergyman in the neighbourhood, whom Mrs Oldcastle knew; for, somehow—­and the fact is not so unusual as to justify especial inquiry here—­though she paid no attention to what our Lord or His apostles said, nor indeed seemed to care to ask herself if what she did was right, or what she accepted (I cannot say believed) was true, she had yet a certain (to me all but incomprehensible) leaning to the clergy.  I think it belongs to the same kind of superstition which many of our own day are turning to.  Offered the Spirit of God for the asking, offered it by the Lord himself, in the misery of their unbelief they betake themselves to necromancy instead, and raise the dead to ask their advice, and follow it, and will find some day that Satan had not forgotten how to dress like an angel of light.  Nay, he can be more cunning with the demands of the time.  We are clever:  he will be cleverer.  Why should he dress and not speak like an angel of light?  Why should he not give good advice if that will help to withdraw people by degrees from regarding the source of all good?  He knows well enough that good advice goes for little, but that what fills the heart and mind goes for much.  What religion is there in being convinced of a future state?  Is that to worship God?  It is no more religion than the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow is religion.  It may be a source of happiness to those who could not believe it before, but it is not religion.  Where religion comes that will certainly be likewise, but the one is not the other.  The devil can afford a kind of conviction of that.  It costs him little.  But to believe that the spirits of the departed are the mediators between God and us is essential paganism—­to call it nothing worse; and a bad enough name too since Christ has come and we have heard and seen the only-begotten of the Father.  Thus the instinctive desire for the wonderful, the need we have of a revelation from above us, denied its proper food and nourishment, turns in its hunger to feed upon garbage.  As a devout German says—­I do not quote him quite correctly —­“Where God rules not, demons will.”  Let us once see with our spiritual eyes the Wonderful, the Counsellor, and surely we shall not turn from Him to seek elsewhere the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Those who sympathize with my feeling in regard to this form of the materialism of our day, will forgive this divergence.  I submit to the artistic blame of such as do not, and return to my story.