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The excellent family must of course be called upon. So far the case admitted of no doubt; but there the matter must end. Such was the determination of the older branches of the family at the Lodge; notwithstanding which, the matter did not end there. They made their call, however, with this intention; and it was wonderful how much they discovered to find fault with in that short and very superficial interview. It was wonderful, considering the new family were people of refinement and taste, how ugly their carpets were, how badly papered their rooms, how strangely their furniture was arranged, and how little appeared to be gained by a western aspect after all, for what a gloom pervaded the drawing-room! "Did you not think so, dear ? "

The individual addressed as "dear" did think so. All the Harper family thought so. One of the servants who had obtained a private view thought so, and thought a great many other things besides-all to the disparagement of the new comers, and the manner of conducting their affairs.

"It was evident," the servants said, "the new family were not gentlefolks born. Indeed, who were they? Tradespeople, no doubt."

So, indeed, in one sense, was Mr. Harper himself. He had been concerned in the cotton trade; but these people, the Ellertons, had been concerned in hemp, and nobody knew what quite a different affair, and very inferior to cotton.

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However this might be, the Ellertons were called upon by all the respectable families in the neighbourhood, and it formed no inconsiderable part of the occupation of the Harper household to discover who were calling, or had called, at the opposite house. For this purpose the children watched at the nursery windows, and the servants watched at theirs. Mrs. Harper, who was far above watching for herself, received intelligence of what took place, and Mr. Harper in his morning rides took note of the carriages which turned towards the Villa, as well as of those which did not.

Altogether, there was great excitement in the Harper family about these new comers, and their goings on. Mrs. Ellerton was a mother like Mrs. Harper, but what had that to do with the case?

"The children at the Villa were no more to be compared with the children at the Lodge than paupers with princes," said the

nurse.

Mr. Ellerton was, like Mr. Harper, a man retired from active business, and both were able and willing to do good in their immediate neighbourhood; but Mr. Ellerton knew nothing-was a mere theorist-a person of no influence whatever, as the people would soon find out. Indeed, there was nothing to be done with such a family, except to be quiet, and let them find their own proper level. The Harpers had discharged their dutythey had called; the call had been returned, and there the matter must rest.

H what a blessing is Sunday, which allows us a precious interval wherein to pause, to come out from the thickets of worldly concerns, and give ourselves up to spiritual and heavenly objects! I can truly declare that to me the Sabbath has been invaluable."-W. Wilberforce.

"He that remembers not to keep the Christian Sabbath at the beginning of the week, will be in danger to forget before the

Coleridge once said to a friend on Sunday morning, "I feel as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, given fifty-two Springs in every

year."

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CHAPTER I.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE REFORMATION.

ARTIN LUTHER is a name at once the bugbear of Romanists and a household word among Protestants. We all seem to know something about him; and we so much like what we know as to want to know more. His colossal reputation looms out on the edge of "the dark ages," like a giant mirage magnified by the eccentric condition of the atmosphere upon which he was reflected; and when, upon a nearer contemplation of his character, he seems to come down to us from the cloud and the mountain-top, his face shines like that of a Moses, radiant with the light of intimate communion with God.

There is certain magnanimity of daring about the character of Luther, which appeals mightily to our English sympathies. His isolated standing-at-bay, confronted by the hosts of papal Europe,-a position chivalrously assumed, and more than heroically maintained, takes our hearts by storm. It is just what we would have him do, had he been a countryman of our own. We are half persuaded he was one, and feel assured that, but for the accident of his birth among our "cousins-german," his name would have been, not Martin Luther, but Martin Bull. Among all our admirable reformers in England, we had not one who left the impress of his individual spirit and theology on the national mind as Luther did in Germany, or Calvin in Switzerland, or Knox in Scotland. Dur own reformers established no new ecclesiastical polities, but they were content to die for the renovation of the old one.

It has become the fashion among some drawing-room theologians to disparage Luther, he sits too strongly on their weak stomachs,-they are sick of him; and it would be strange if they could digest the man whom. Leo X. found too hard to swallow. Luther was "he that troubled Israel," such men say; and the disguising Ahabs and painted Jezebels of the day brought the same charge against Elijah.

Luther was "superstitious" say they,and well he might be. Things wear their most eccentric and monstrous shapes in the dim exaggerated caricatures of twilight. But when the sun arose upon his soul, "they gat them away to their dens," as if pelted with the tiles of Wittemberg. The infirmities of Luther were due to his popish antecedents; his virtues, to the pious heroism that rejected them.

I do not think Luther is really known among us. Until the appearance of Mr. Hazlitt's profoundly philosophical portrait of the great reformer, justice was scarcely done him in England. We still want more insight into the man. Sir James Stephen (in his article, in No. 138 of the Edinburgh Review, on D'Aubigné's History) observes: "History having claimed him for her own, Biography has yielded to the pretensions of her more stately sister, and the domestic and interior life of the antagonist of Leo and of Charles yet remains to be written. I have searched even D'Aubigné in vain for a portrait of 'Luther at Home.' He came forth on the theatre of life another Samson Agonistes, with plain heroic magnitude of mind, and celestial vigour armed,' ready to wage an unequal combat with the haughtiest of the 'giants of Gath,' or to shake down, though it were on his own head, the columns of the proudest of her temples."

Luther's warlike spirit might have steeped

him in terrible and continual antagonism, but that it was counterpoised by a constitutional melancholy, that often melted him, like Saul, to tears, and led him to play the David to his own gloomy hallucinations-soothing down his spirit by his own hand and lute and voice, to the tune of those noble melodies which connect the memory of the stern reformer with the softer associations of the musical

and pathetic. When, under the influence of a better light, he yielded, with the heartiest relish, to the innocent convivialities of his friends, his broad humour and raillery betokened the relaxation of a master mind, abdicating an habitual sovereignty over other men, to become for a passing hour their companion.

Martin Luther was born on November 10th, 1483, at Eisleben, in Saxony. His father, John Luther, was employed in the mines, and by his intelligence and character had been raised to opulence, respect, and to an appointment in the local magistracy. At fourteen, Luther was sent to school at Magdeburg; but, in less than a year, was transferred to a superior establishment in charge of the Franciscans, at Eisenach. Here he distinguished himself in the abstruse and clumsy grammar of the day, and by the spirit and easy flow of his Latin verses. In 1502 he entered the college of Erfurt, and the next year graduated as M.A.; and having now run through the curriculum of all the sciences which the universities could then afford, he was persuaded by his family to abandon theology for the study of the law. Accident-or rather, Providence alone occasioned his return to the study of divinity.

In 1504, walking in the fields with his young and beloved friend Alexius, a sudden thunderbolt struck his companion dead at his feet. At the spectacle of such an awful disaster, Luther was led to think seriously of the necessity of being ever ready for the great change" for in an hour that ye know not the Son of Man cometh." It was the age of monkery; no better notion of preparing for Heaven was then entertained, than shutting up the living man in a cell, little larger or lighter than his sepulchre, and imitating the dead-playing at mortmain as far as possible-in the grave-clothes of cowl and

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hood, like a shroud, lying in sackcloth, feeding on ashes, affecting silence and solitude, and dozing upon relics and dead men's bones. How far it consulted the glory of God, the good of society, or of the individual sinnerthe gloomy anachronism that parodied the dead self in the lifetime of the living onethe common sense as well as religious sense of Protestantism has yet to learn. Over the ashes of his friend, Luther made a solemn vow to abjure the world and assume the cowl.

"Re

In 1505 he was admitted an Augustinian monk at Erfurt, and soon became remarkable for his mortifications, labours, fastings, and prayers. Luther had never yet seen a Bible, beyond the fragments of it read in the mass. The Faculty of Theology at Paris had just issued the memorable declaration that ligion was undone, if the study of Greek or Hebrew were permitted "-a declaration that stands in European history, like the obelisks in the Nile floods, a landmark by which to gauge the depth of Papal inundation on Christendom! The general opinion may be summed up in the oration of a popular friar of the day, who said,

"They have invented a new language, which they call Greek: you must be on your guard against it. There is in the hands of many, a book which they call the New Testament: it is a book full of daggers and poison. As to the Hebrew, it is certain that whoever learns it, immediately becomes a Jew."

Two years after, an old copy of the Scriptures, made by one of Cassidorus' monks in an early century, fell into Luther's hands. He was already ordained, and when his ignorance of God's Word became painfully apparent to his mind, he felt bitterly the Saviour's reproach, "Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these things?" but though, like the Jewish ruler, he had come to the Word of God in darkness, he was soon to find it to be "a light to his feet, and a lantern to his paths." He studied Scripture with even a greater and holier ardour than the zeal with which he had already mastered the sciences. Its statutes became "the men of his council." The future professor of logic and theology obeyed upon his knees the Saviour's precept, "Search the Scriptures '

and he found them verify His declaration, "They testify of Me." He found Christ in the law, Christ in the prophets, Christ in the Psalms-a typical Christ in the ritual of Leviticus-a symbolical Christ in historical persons and parallels-a practical Christ in the sorrows and trials, comforts and triumphs, of His saints-and Christ at last his own "all in all." This blessed effect is promised in the Book, to them that approach its temple

of truth, as the Grecians in the Gospel did, saying, "We would see Jesus." "If thou seek Him, He will be found of thee." He found his light growing, his knowledge advancing, and his difficulties rapidly dispersing, like the mountain mist before the sunrise, till the cloud in which its head had been hidden shone out like Sinai, radiant with the light of Heaven, and glorious with the presence of God!

HE Hon. Charles Brodrick Bernard, D.D., Lord Bishop of Tuam, Killala, and Achonry, is the second son of

the second Earl of Bandon. His mother was the eldest daughter of the late Archbishop (Brodrick) of Cashel. He was born 1811, and was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated B.A. 1832, M.A. 1834, D.D. 1866. He was ordained for the curacy of Desertserges, Diocese of Cork, 1835; became Vicar of Bantry, 1840; Rector and Prebendary of Kilbrogan, 1842; and was consecrated Bishop of Tuam, Killala, and Achonry, at Armagh, on January 13th, 1867.

During his thirty-two years' residence in the Diocese of Cork he was well known as an earnest and hard-working clergyman. Very early in his ministry he discovered the great drawback of not understanding or speaking the Irish language; he at once set to work, and, with the assistance of an Irish reader, before two years was able to read and preach to his people in their native tongue. As honorary secretary of the Diocesan Church Education Society, he was a zealous and liberal supporter of Scriptural education, and had so organized the Diocesan Schools, that on his elevation to the Episcopate he left them in a prosperous state as regards funds, training-school inspection, and practical efficiency.

The Bishop is one of the warmest friends

of the Irish Society. "This Society," he said recently, "speaks to the people in a language which they can understand; and, when I say that, we must bear in mind that those even who speak English as well as Irish always think in Irish,-it is the language of their hearths, it is the language of their homes, it is the language of their hearts. They love it and it comes home to them with an application, a force, a reality, and a love that invests it with a peculiar interest."

On the same occasion the Bishop thus told the story of his own acquisition of the Irish language.

"I had been educated from first to last in England, but when I had the privilege of seeking for admission into the ministry I chose dear Ireland as my field. As I pursued the studies which were necessary to fit me for examination for the office, I felt that there would be one great glaring omission in the course of study if I did not set myself to learn the Irish language. I felt that it was folly, madness, criminal almost, to seek to go forward amongst those who spoke in the Irish language and to be a mute amongst them.

"Now before I entered the ministry, how do you think I found out the great value of learning the Irish language? Where did I find it? It was not in my County of Cork; it was not in any portion of Ireland. It was at Brighton-Brighton in the County of