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 the justice of Providence? Has the Great Father that benign pity, that watchful care for His children, which you preachers tell us?' Ever intent on deducing examples from the lives to which the clue has become apparent, must be the Priest who has to reason with Affliction caused by no apparent fault; and where, judged by the Canons of Human justice, cloud and darkness obscure the Divine--still to 'vindicate the ways of God to man.'"

DARRELL.--"A philosophy that preceded, and will outlive, all other schools. It is twin-born with the world itself. Go on; though the theme be inexhaustible, its interest never flags."

GEORGE MORLEY.--"Has it struck you, Mr. Darrell, that few lives have ever passed under your survey; in which the inexpressible tenderness of the Omniscient has been more visibly clear than in that of your guest, William Losely?"

DARRELL (surprised).--"Clear? To me, I confess that if ever there were an instance in which the Divine tenderness, the Divine justice, which I can never presume to doubt, was yet undiscernible to my bounded vision, it is in the instance of the very life you refer to. I see a man of admirable virtues--of a childlike simplicity of character, which makes him almost unconscious of the grandeur of his own soul--involved by a sublime self-sacrifice--by a virtue, not by a fault--in the most dreadful of human calamities--ignominious degradation;--hurled in the midday of life from the sphere of honest men--a felon's brand on his name--a vagrant in his age; justice at last, but tardy and niggard, and giving him but little joy when it arrives; because, ever thinking only of others, his heart is wrapped in a child whom he cannot make happy in the way in which his hopes have been set!--George-no, your illustration might be turned by a sceptic into an argument against you."

GEORGE MORLEY.--"Not unless the sceptic refused the elementary starting-ground from which you and I may reason; not if it be granted that man has a soul, which it is the object of this life to enrich and develop for another. We know from my uncle what William Losely was before this calamity befell him--a genial boon-companion--a careless, frank, 'good fellow'--all the virtues you now praise in him dormant, unguessed even by himself. Suddenly