"And that aid is not compulsion," said L'Isle, "as every page of
Scripture testifies. There is something strangely illogical in the
reasoning of those who, starting from the point, that what has been
decreed by God is as good as done, and the future as fixed as the
past, thence exhort us to plead, because the decree has gone forth; to
run in the race, because the victor has been chosen, and the prize
adjudged; to strive, because the battle has been fought; and to repent
and be saved, because our final destiny was decided before time was.
Surely, if this life have any bearing on another, we are running a
race, the issue of which is undecided until death; and ours is a real
struggle, not merely the acting out of a foregone conclusion, not the
dramatic representation of a past event. What would you think of a
modern Greek praying zealously that Mohamed II. should not _have
taken_ Constantinople? Or of a Roman of to-day besieging heaven with
prayers that Rome should not _have been_ taken by the Goths, or sacked
by the army of the Constable Bourbon? Yet what is commonly called
Calvinist is nothing less than this; praying against past events, or
the decrees of fate. Is the papist so absurd in offering his masses
for the dead?"

The ladies were still complimenting L'Isle on his refutation of
Moodie's tenets, so obnoxious to their own convictions, when they met
a peasant trudging along, _cujado_ in hand, with the small end of
which he occasionally enlivened the motions of an ass toiling under a
heavy sack of grain. The muleteer stopped him to enquire where they
might find water for their animals in this thirsty land. The peasant
pointed back to a thicket near the road, and said: "I would have
watered my own beast there, but for the would have watered my own
beast there, but for the company I would have fallen among." He then