bouleversement which has taken place in our religious relations,
--even in each man's little sphere. It is as if the religious
world were a masquerade, where you cease to feel surprise at
finding some familiar acquaintance disguised in the most
fantastical costume. There is our old friend W----, rigorously,
as you know, educated in his old father's Evangelical notions,
ready to be a confessor for the two wax candies, even though
unlighted, and to be a martyr for them if but lighted. His
cousin in the opposite direction has found even the most meagre
naturalism too much for him, and avows himself a Pantheist.
L----, the son, you remember, of an independent minister, is
ready to go nobly to death in defence of the prerogatives of
his "apostolic succession"; and has not the slightest doubts that
he can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link,
from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!--though, poor fellow,
it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather.
E----, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome,
and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole
cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists (who,
by the way, stand fairly aghast at his insatiable appetite), have
not been able to fill it. All the saints in the Roman Hagiography
cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other
hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of
stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till
at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze
of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and
blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P----, true to his
youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who
has the "charity which believeth all, things," though certainly
not that which "bareth all things," goes about apologizing for all