Long after his steps died away she stood watching the light from the Prodigy's window. None came from the library, where the Professor had thrown himself down in the darkness.

For days, weeks, the Prodigy explored the borderlands of Life. Sometimes he went very far; but his father's hand always drew him groping back to the big white room. Every day Miss Lizzy came in and sat in the low wicker chair near the bed, sharing the Professor's silence for a strange half hour. Often he did not notice her, and she loved him the better for it.

ment. But from her it irritated him. He turned quickly. "Let me speak to you in the library, Miss Wood," he said to the nurse, who had been effacing herself in a magical way, much as if she carried Siegfried's cloak handily over her arm.

Smiling happily and absent-mindedly after them, Miss Lizzy opened the door and went in. Not till she gained the bedside did she see that the Professor had fallen asleep, his hand clasping the Prodigy's, his dark head close to the child's white cheek. All the lovableness of his face, seen so, impressed itself on her heart. The pallor of long sleeplessness, the defacement of long pain, had given it the appeal to win her at last. She had not thought before that they resembled each other greatly; but looking down now she saw that the boy was but a fair little image of his father. "My poor little boys," she said beneath her breath. She felt as if she were a guardian angel hovering over them with outspread plumage. She smiled at herself. "I have been as perfectly useless as one, anyway," she

"Father," he said vaguely.

The Professor dropped to his knees by the bed, answering with touch and smile.

"Hold my hand," said the Prodigy, going to sleep again peacefully.

The Professor looked up, asking his first question since the night it happened, not that he spoke now.

"Luck's your way this time, Jim," said Preston, in the tone of a lenient judge.

Into the Professor's heavy eyes leaped the marveling of the miracle-beholder. He put his head on the Prodigy's pillow, and Preston went out, signing the nurse to follow.

In the hall stood Miss Lizzy. "Eavesdropping?" queried the doctor light-heartedly.

“Oh, Frank, I was afraid to go in." "Go on. He will need you now that he does n't need you. The little chap knew him," he added softly.

She too offered that tribute of wonder

Slowly the Prodigy journeyed back to his tiny place in the world of men. Instead of being older than his years, his eyes were now younger. The pondering intelligence was gone. In its place flowered a soft wonder, a babyish questioning, an insatiable demanding of affection from surrounding slaves.

One afternoon the Professor carried him to a big chair on an upper porch. Preston followed. The Prodigy lay back among some blue-ruffled couch pillows. A little blue dressing-gown wrapped him. A gay, blue-striped steamer rug covered his knees. All this blue deepened in his eyes to an azure, heavenly and intense. Preston, who had halted by a table strewn with illustrated weeklies, offered the Prodigy one.

"I'll let you look at some pictures today," he said carelessly.

The Prodigy, having been long debarred such things, turned the pages with childish interest. Presently he

looked up, keeping a page open with one thin little claw.

"What ships are these, father?"

66

'Are n't the names there, Win?" said Preston. His eyes caught the Professor's.

"I don't know," said the Prodigy. A puzzlement troubled the pure blue of his eyes. His little head with its newly grown toss of loose, light curls turned from one to the other. "I-I can't read them," he

stammered gropingly.

went.

Now the father's heart thrilled with the thought that the child would soon be well enough to learn to read.

It was an Indian summer afternoon, a golden, mellow caress in its coolness, a dim, sweet sounding of earth's music in its stillness. Suddenly the Prodigy lifted himself, and looked eagerly across the campus to where the public school boys were spreading over their ball ground. An upflung bat glinted in the sun. Distant shouts disturbed the silence.

Taking the paper, he explained the battleships with that vivid wealth of detail dear to a boy's heart. The Prodigy listened, the faint trouble vanishing. At last Preston laid the paper aside. "I'd better be off," he cried, "if I'm to be seven miles out in the country by five."

The Professor followed him into the hall, catching his arm in a grip that pinched. Well," said Preston, in a low voice, "you've read of such things, have n't you, Jim ?"

"But it's happened to my boy," said the Professor, "to my boy!" He repeated it like a fool.

"Good thing, too," said Preston. "Now he knows as little as he ought to know. Buy him a primer, Jim."

He went away, looking back at the Professor, who still stared foolishly at the blankness of this inconceivable thing. He felt like a brute; but consider. It was plain enough to all their world these days that Miss Lizzy meant to marry the Professor.

The Professor went back and took the Prodigy up in his arms. "Father's baby," he crooned, folding him against his breast. His mind grew clearer. So it had been that near,

not death, though death had been breathlessly near, but that dreadfuller than death, that horror he balked at naming. The last shred of his selfish, vain, little ambition was torn painfully away. A healing peace descended on him. The Prodigy could have entered college that fall, so far as being prepared

"Like it, old fellow?" asked the Professor.

The Prodigy ignored this. "Father' he said, "I remember now. I remember that I have forgotten things I used to know."

"Yes," replied the Professor, matterof-fact in manner, "you would, you know. You were pretty sick, Win.”

"And I don't know any more than other boys now?"

His tone was hopeful yet fearful,

too.

"Not as much, Win," said the Professor. He was able to say it without a pang.

The Prodigy straightened up, sparkled. New tides of life pulsed through his thin little body. "When I get well,” he said, "I'm going over there to school." His words unfurled like a gay banner in the golden October air.

"Sure," said the Professor, with creditable promptness for a man whose breath had been taken away.

The Prodigy sank back. His soft curls cuddled in the crook of his father's arm. The sudden sleepiness of weakness mastered him. "Sing something," he ordered; "sing "The minstrel boy to the war has gone.' He listened with infinite satisfaction, gazing up into the pale zenith, falling asleep at last to the mingling strains of distant boyish shouts, and the song of an ancient, beautiful, boyish bravado:

"But the harp he loved ne'er spake again, For he tore its chords asunder."

"Oh, Lizzy!" exclaimed the Professor just above his breath. She met his eyes, bewildered. Did he not know? He alone of all her world?

"How right you were," he cried, at the end of that long look. "I have never deserved you, Lizzy, — unless it's now when I know what a fool I've been, - and how dare I ask you to marry a fool?" He brooded a moment. "You'd better take Preston," he broke out bitterly, jealously.

"Jim," said Miss Lizzy, beautiful, crimson, longing to laugh, "I've managed my own affairs for thirty-two years. I need no advice from you. Frank Preston, indeed!"

Their eyes met in mutual, ungrateful disdain.

"I can't move," whispered the Professor.

He glanced down tenderly at the small, clinging hands. The boy stirred, clung closer.

Miss Lizzy's blush increased. She no longer felt like laughing. She leaned over a little more. Just then the child half roused, half opened his sleepy eyes, put up a drowsy arm about her neck. "Kiss me," he said.

THEY are all in furtherance of expansion. Some, indeed, would expand religion to the point of vaporization; but this is an inevitable accompaniment of freedom. It belongs to that perfect liberty which carries with it the privilege of error and of folly. It means that truth is discovered by experiment, after a good many of the experiments have failed.

There is, of course, in the contemporary literature of religion a proper amount of cautious conservation. There are brethren who are both scandalized and scared. But the scared and scandalized theologians, for the most part, get their books printed in rather small quantities, and by publishers who have little more than a denominational constituency. They do not come to the table of the reviewer. The books of religion which are being widely read at present are of the liberal sort.

The difference between this situation and the attitude of our recent ancestors appears in Dr. Greene's admirable monograph on The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut.1 The Cambridge Platform of 1648, dealing with the duties of the Civil Magistrate “in matters Ecclesiastical," declared that the foremost duty of the state is to put down blasphemy, idolatry, and heresy. The magistrates were to advise with the elders in the trial of heretics, and in cases of condemnation were to remember that such offenders were "moral lepers for whose evil influence the community was responsible to God."

This repressive legislation made no end of trouble not only for dissenters, but for the orthodox as well. The Estab

1 The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut. By M. LOUISE GREENE, Ph. D. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1905.

lished Order found itself in the position of a schoolmaster who has made a rule which contradicts human nature. He cannot enforce it. Human nature finds various ways whereby to evade him, or, failing that, defies him openly. Thus at Yale the New Lights persisted in disturbing the academic peace. The authorities expelled David Brainerd—now remembered as a missionary and a saint - for criticising the college prayers. They dismissed the Cleveland boys because in the vacation of 1744 they went to church with their parents, who were Separatists. They suppressed Locke's essay Concerning Toleration, which the senior class had secretly printed at their own expense. But the New Lights were no more discouraged than the rising sun.

With much learning and insight into the meaning of events, with a lucid style and without prejudice, Dr. Greene has written a valuable religious history of Connecticut. The lesson which she does not draw, but which is plain enough - is that repression of private opinion, even when such opinion is in error, is not for the advantage of religious truth. It makes faction and controversy, divides churches, embitters differences, destroys brotherly love, and, after all, does not gain its purpose. The argument of truth is not assisted by the courts. These troubles were ended for the moment by the Great Awakening. That religious revival changed the subject.

How religion prospers in the sunshine of such a spirit is shown by Professor Harnack in his Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. He finds, indeed, that the organization of the Chris

2

2 The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. By ADOLF HARNACK. Translated by JAMES MOFFAT. Two vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1905.

tian community had a great deal to do with it. It combined the two principles of individualism and association. Thus, in regard to every Christian, he was expected to save his soul,- the very formula of individualism, while at the same time he was forbidden to forsake the assembly of his brethren. And in regard to the community, there was on the one hand the local parish with its presbyter, and on the other hand the territorial district with its bishop, each having its own independent prerogative. It was this combination, according to Dr. Harnack, which made the primitive Church such a power in the Empire. The primitive Church was at the same time Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopal.

Professor Harnack deals also with the doctrine of the early Christians. He discovers the "sad passion for heresy-hunting" as early as the second century. "These people," said Celsus, "utter all sorts of blasphemy, mentionable and unmentionable, against one another, nor will they give way in the smallest point for the sake of concord, hating each other with a perfect hatred." At the same time, together with an endeavor after doctrinal uniformity, there was maintained a singular complexity of opposites. Some were for humbling the human understanding under the word of ecclesiastical authority; some held that Christianity was a system of philosophy, reasonable and lucid and eminently provable; some were mystics, for whom religion was a sacramental mystery whereby they entered into the immediate perception of God.

But the chief characteristic of the Christian religion in the time of its early expansion was its good, honest, helpful living. This was the convincing apologetic of the primitive Christians. They held the religion of the Spirit and of power, of moral earnestness and holiness; they preached and practiced the gospel of love and charity; they offered to save men both from sin and from sickness; they went about, like Christian Scientists, with gifts of healing. Professor Harnack

does not mention Christian Science by name, but he has it in his mind when he remarks that the Founder of Christianity did not explain that sickness is health. There was nothing artificial or sentimental, he says, about Him. Nevertheless, he finds that the Christians made a great point of curing disease, and that they did it without medicine. He shows how Christianity supplanted the cult of Esculapius. It would have been a fair thing at this point to acknowledge that the Christian Scientists, whatever their errors, have returned to the primitive prac tice of Christianity, and that the extraordinary expansion of their sect in our time is an illustration of Dr. Harnack's subject.

Some of the obstacles which lay in the way of the expansion of Christianity in the first three centuries are shown in Dr. Wright's Cities of Paul,1 in Dr. Healy's Valerian Persecution, and in Dr. Crapsey's Religion and Politics. The old world, as Dr. Wright displays it in his interesting chapters, was very like the new. Even Ancyra, though it is most unlikely that St. Paul visited it, is abundantly illustrative of the fickle and superficial spirit of the times. The reader suspects that the dramatic properties of the place inclined the writer to look with favor on the North-Galatian theory, which is no longer in good standing among scholars. Tarsus, however, comes rightly enough into the book, and there Dr. Wright finds a colossal image of Sardanapalus snapping his stone fingers in the face of the world, saying, "Eat, drink, and be merry. Nothing else is worth that." This common sensuality was the most serious hindrance in the way of the true religion.

1 Cities of Paul. By WILLIAM BURNET WRIGHT. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1905.

2 The Valerian Persecution. By PATRICK J. HEALY. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1905.

3 Religion and Politics. By ALGERNON S. CRAPSEY. New York: Thomas Whittaker. 1905.