Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/317

 planets laughed at her great pope, the pope made the memorable reply, that people ought not to laugh at Religion. But Red missions, at great cost, were sent even as far as our earth. Indeed, these were not entirely unsuccessful, as some of our extremer sectaries, under Red argumentative ingenuity, re-acted into the Red views, and became in turn their active promoters upon their own home ground. These would, for instance, follow our pious clergy and missionaries into death-bed scenes, in order to exhort them to leave alone some unhappy-minded object of their visit, in his condition of comparative safety, and attend rather to their own awful prospect, confronted as they were by the inevitable Nemesis of their present apparently bright and happy condition.

One of the latest Red-life incidents is reported to us in one of the last members of the Red Times, a daily print I regularly take in. A fellow of incurably vicious temper, after murdering his wife, had concluded by taking off also his mother-in-law, in order, as he remarked with cool atrocity, to make one clean sweep of the worry of the whole family concern. Instantly a crowd, with one loud long wail of pity and commiseration, conducted the unhappy wretch to the comfortable Resanitation Retreat, provided for such distressing cases. There a dozen old ladies at once volunteered their services, taking this reprobate by turns night and day, soothing his every feeling, supplying his every want, and never for an unnecessary instant leaving him alone. The cure, we are told, was marvellously rapid. On quitting the Retreat, he was overheard to mutter, and in no mincing way, that all the mothers-in-law in the universe should not see