'Tis hard to part when friends are dear, Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a tear:

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me good morning."

XIII.

RELIGION.

"AH!" sighed Shelley to Leigh Hunt, as the organ was playing in the cathedral at Pisa, "what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith."

"In the seventeenth century," says Dean Stanley, in one of his Lectures on the Church of Scotland, "the minister of the parish of Anworth was the famous Samuel Rutherford, the great religious oracle of the Covenanters and their adherents. It was, as all readers of his letters will remember, the spot which he most loved on earth. The very swallows and sparrows which found their nests in the church of Anworth were, when far away, the objects of his affectionate envy. Its hills and valleys were the witnesses of his ardent devotion when living; they still retain his memory with unshaken fidelity. It is one of the traditions thus cherished on the spot, that on a Saturday evening, at one of those family gatherings whence, in the language of the good Scottish poet, • Old Scotia's grandeur springs,'

when Rutherford was catechising his children and servants, that a stranger knocked at the door of the manse, and begged shelter for the night. The minister kindly received him, and asked him to take his

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place amongst the family and assist at their religious exercises. It so happened that the question in the catechism which came to the stranger's turn was that which asks, 'How many commandments are there?' He answered, Eleven.' Eleven!' exclaimed Rutherford; ‘I am surprised that a man of your age and appearance should not know better. What do you mean?' And he answered, ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.' Rutherford was much impressed by the answer, and they retired to rest. The next morning he rose early to meditate on the services of the day. The old manse of Anworth stood, its place is still pointed out, —in the corner of a field, under the hill-side, and thence a long, winding, wooded path, still called Rutherford's Walk, leads to the church. Through this glen he passed, and, as he threaded his way through the thicket, he heard amongst the trees the voice of the stranger at his morning devotions. The elevation of the sentiments and of the expressions convinced him that it was no common man. He accosted him, and the traveler confessed to him that he was no other than the great divine and scholar, Archbishop Usher, the Primate of the Church of Ireland, one of the best and most learned men of his age, who well fulfilled that new commandment in the love which he won and which he bore to others; one of the few links of Christian charity between the fierce contending factions of that time, devoted to King Charles I. in his life-time, and

honored in his grave by the Protector Cromwell. He it was who, attracted by Rutherford's fame, had thus come in disguise to see him in the privacy of his own home. The stern Covenanter welcomed the stranger prelate; side by side they pursued their way along Rutherford's Walk to the little church, of which the ruins still remain; and in that small Presbyterian sanctuary, from Rutherford's rustic pulpit, the archbishop preached to the people of Anworth on the words which had so startled his host the evening before: A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.'"

In a legend which St. Jerome has recorded, and which, says the same writer, in his Essays on the Apostolic Age, is "not the less impressive because so familiar to us, we see the aged Apostle (John) borne in the arms of his disciples into the Ephesian assembly, and there repeating over and over again the same saying, ‘Little children, love one another;' till, when asked why he said this and nothing else, he replied in those well-known words, fit indeed to be the farewell speech of the beloved disciple, Because this is our Lord's command, and if you fulfill this, nothing else is needed.'"

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"An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season," says Emerson, "would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. Love would put a new face on this weary old world, in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain di

plomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies and navies and lines of defense, would be superseded by this unarmed child." We do not believe, or we forget, that "the Holy Ghost came down, not in the shape of a vulture, but in the form of a dove."

“Tell me, gentle traveler, who hast wandered through the world, and seen the sweetest roses blow, and brightest gliding rivers, of all thine eyes have seen, which is the fairest land?' 'Child, shall I tell thee where nature is most blest and fair? It is where those we love abide. Though that space be small, ample is it above kingdoms; though it be a desert, through it runs the river of paradise, and there are the enchanted bowers.""

"We ought," says the author of Ecce Homo, "to be just as tolerant of an imperfect creed as we are of an imperfect practice. Everything which can be urged in excuse for the latter may also be pleaded for the former. If the way to Christian action is beset by corrupt habits and misleading passions, the path to Christian truth is overgrown with prejudices, and strewn with fallen theories and rotting systems which hide it from our view. It is quite as hard to think rightly as to act rightly, or even to feel rightly. And as all allow that an error is a less culpable thing than a crime or a vicious passion, it is monstrous that it should be more severely punished; it is monstrous that Christ, who was called the friend of publicans and sinners, should be represented as the pitiless enemy of bewildered seekers of truth. How could men have been guilty of such an inconsistency? By speaking of what they do not understand. Men in gen