prepared to give up the world! The God that he tells them of is a
fiction of his imagination; indeed, I might say a mere creature of his
fancy, who is going to save all men in the end, whatever they do!"

"A Universalist!"

"Oh, worse than that--at least, I have read the books of Universalists
who, though their error was great, did not appear to me so far astray. I
cannot understand it! I cannot understand it!" he went on; "I cannot
understand the influence that he has obtained over our more educated
class; for twenty years ago he was himself a low, besotted drunkard, and
his wife is the daughter of a murderer! Still less do I understand how
such people can claim to be religious at all, and yet not see to what
awful evil the small beginnings of vice must lead. I tell you, if a man
is allowed by Providence to lead an easy life, and remains unfaithful,
he may still have some good metal in him which adversity might refine;
but when people have gone through all that Toyner and his wife have been
through--not a child that has been born to them but has died at the
breast--I say, when they have been through all that, and still lead a
worldly, unsatisfactory life, you may be sure that there is nothing in
them that has the true ring of manhood or womanhood."

I was left alone to enter Mr. Toyner's gates. I found myself in a large
pleasure-ground, where Nature had been guided, not curtailed, in her
work. I was walking upon a winding drive, walled on either side by a
wild irregular line of shrubs, where the delicate forms of acacias and
crab-apples lifted themselves high in comparison to the lower lilac and
elderberry-bushes. I watched the sunlit acacias as they fluttered,
spreading their delicate leaves and golden pods against the blue above
me. I made my way leisurely in the direction of music which I heard at