Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/93

Rh we are never allowed to use them except when Fred is here; and then there is the sailing-boat, and the steam-barge."

"A steam-barge? What is that used for?"

"Papa thought it would be very nice to have a steamer for picnic parties, and it was great fun at first steaming up ever so fast against stream; but one soon got tired of sitting in it doing nothing, and I don't think we had it out once all last summer. Papa keeps a man to look after the engine, and lends it to any one who wants it." Lucy rattled on in this way, trying to recover her composure, which was in danger of giving way whenever, glancing up, she caught Yorke's face looking at her with an expression she had never seen it wear before. There was no guile in little Lucy's heart, nor any cause for suspicion in her lover's. Her father, no doubt, wanted her to find a mate of some sort, but no pressure had been needed in this case. Surrounded by almost boundless wealth, these girls had yet led a thoroughly secluded life; this hero, who had appeared like a star among the humdrum people who made up her father's visiting acquaintance, seemed to be the first gentleman, except Fred, whom she had ever known. The noble creature had won her simple little heart at first sight; and now the hopes she had hardly dared form were realized. He had called her his dearest Lucy, and kissed her, and was now looking down fondly on her face. This hero and petted man of fashion, who might no doubt have had his choice of damsels moving in fashionable circles of which she had never stepped on even the outer edge, had deigned to smile on her and was really hers! and to think that only a few weeks ago she had been nearly prevailed on for very pity to accept Mr. Hanckes, when he asked her for the fourth time!

 

 From Macmillan's Magazine.

ancient words, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" and those other, "Thou art careful and cumbered about many things; but one thing is needful," seem now to many among us not as once, solemnly and surely true, but either true no longer, or monuments of what was from the beginning but a melancholy delusion. There is no such "one thing needful," these will tell you, any more than there is a universal panacea; and the true rule of life is to give your attention wholly, and without reserve, to each thing as it comes. As for the enterprise of saving your soul many have set forth on that quest; much experience has been gathered by this time of that system of life. And what conclusion does the evidence lead us to? Is there a more miserable creature than he who makes it his sole concern to save his soul? Is he not, for practical purposes, a person of diseased mind? Does he not too often in the end sink into actual madness? What more wretched chapter in human history than that which records the more conspicuous examples of men plagued with this fixed idea — kings trembling before their confessors, and Pretenders such as Bolingbroke describes, actuated ever by fear of "the horns of the devil and of the flames of hell!"

But such arguments do not quite succeed in robbing the old maxims of their impressiveness. The majestic sounds overawe us in spite of our scepticism. They may, we feel, have been misinterpreted so as to lead to lamentable results, and be true for all that. It happens here, as in most of the passionate attacks made in these days upon Christianity, that when all is said, only the ecclesiastical gloss upon the maxim has been shaken, not the maxim itself, and there remains a shrewd suspicion that this would prove true after all, if we could discover the original sense of it, or hit upon the modern application.

After all, the doctrine that man has a soul which can be saved or lost is not to be exploded by any change either in religious or philosophical belief. The doctrine that there is one thing needful, and that one thing religion, may, it seems to me, be propounded with as much confidence now as in the most orthodox ages. And indeed such notions are not peculiar to Christianity; peculiar to Christianity is only the skill that brings them home to all mankind alike, and the world-redeeming faith which resolves to make common to all what seems by its nature only accessible to the few; no doubt an enterprise involving the necessary risk of giving rise to monstrous perversions and delusions, which an exclusive philosophy is exempt from.

Mr. Carlyle, with many of the Germans whom he has followed, and of the English who follow him, has always insisted much upon this point. He dislikes all ecclesiastical systems, almost as much as