unusually cheerful. "At least there will always be the Sundays," she thought, "they will help me through the week." They or something else had helped her already. She was less abrupt with her mother and gentler with the children. Mr. Harden ventured to read the Banner of Light aloud to her evenings when work did not press. Mathilde would have prefered her own books, but she thought he may as well talk to me as to that horrid Cheever who is always wanting to borrow fifty cents. It's tedious but it pleases him and it saves the fifty cents." Thinking of all these things, with stray reflections regarding the grocer and butcher, Mathilde hurried home.

She found Clem Wright talking to her mother in the "sitting-room." He sat in the old hair cloth arm-chair, and while he talked, his big fingers pulled at the wiry hairs where the cloth on the arms had worn away. His large red face looked only the redder to Mathilde for a slender moustache which her first glance decided to be dyed. She had never liked Wright, she thought he flattered her mother for purposes of his own, and she had felt relieved by his departure for Chicago, two years before. His return was anything but a pleasure. Still there appeared a necessity for some pretense of civility, so Mathilde said she was surprised."

Ha!

He grew very red as he jumped up and grasped her hand, laughing affectedly. "Oh yes, bad penny back again, you see. Ha!" He seemed to Mathilde needlessly uncomfortable. Her mother too had flushed in an odd fashion. Mathilde left the room angry and perplexed.

The next two weeks brought her no enlightenment. Wright came almost daily. He seemed to prefer Mathilde's society to her mother's, talking in glowing terms of his restaurant in Chicago, and hinting that it needed a woman's taste-" a young lady's taste," he put it, for he had a most genteel vocabulary. Then he would smile and look at Mathilde out of the corners of his eyes until she wondered if any other man alive had quite such odious looks. Every time he came he wore a new cravat, the purest of Hot Springs diamonds flamed from the

cravat; and he clad his manly proportions in a plaid suit of the lastest English cut from somebody's "square dealing clothing emporium." Mathilde used to look at him, resplendent on the sofa, filling the air with mingled suggestions of Night Blooming Cereus and rose pomade, and question herself about him. "What does he want? He always used to want mother to take him into partnership. What does he want now?" She discovered what he wanted, one sunny afternoon in May. Coming into her mother's room she found a 66 scene " in progress. Her mother sat by the window, with her handkerchief displayed. Her father was restlessly walking the room. At intervals the word "crazy!" was jerked over his shoulder. "What's the matter?" said Mathilde, in the door way.

"Matter enough," groaned Harden between his teeth, "your mother's ruined us, that's the matter! Tell her yourself, “he shouted furiously at his wife," you 've done it! Oh! it's enough to drive a man mad to have such a woman as you for his wife ! ” He caught up the hat on the table and tried to jam it on his head; happening to be Tiff's hat, it was naturally too small. Harden dashed it on the floor with an oath and strode out of the room.

Mathilde opened her eyes; she had never seen her father in such a condition. Mrs. Harden burst into tears. "Well!" said Mathilde.

"I wish I had never married!" sobbed Mrs. Harden, "girls don't know when they are well off. I don't care! I have a right to do what I please with my own money. And it is a good bargain any-"

"What have you been doing?" said Mathilde.

"You need n't be sassy too! It was my own prop

"What have you been doing?" repeated Mathilde.

Her mother shrank back into her chair; the truth came out in a whimper, punctuated with sobs. "I've sold the r-restaurant toCle-Clement Wright!"

Mathilde walked up to her mother's chair. In utter silence she looked into the sullen and tearful eyes of Mrs. Harden, against

her will lifted to meet her own; Mathilde's face was a grayish white and her eyes glowed. Without a word she turned away. "Are the deeds signed?" she said in a hard voice, "Is it too late yet?"

Mrs. Harden checked her sobs. "Of course they're signed, your father signed too. You need n't act so funny, Mathilde. I'm sure if you 're set on staying here you can easy enough. Clement Wright will be only too glad, poor fellow. And I'm sure I could n't ask a better son-in-law-———” "Mother!” cried Mathilde. She flung out her arms with a wild gesture. Then she rushed away. Mrs. Harden called after her but she did not come back.

No one saw her for half an hour. Then she came to the kitchen door which looked out on the little yard Here the O'Callahan struggled with a few herbs of dilatory disposition, parsley, mace, mint and the like. On the door-step sat Mr. Harden leaning his elbows on his knees and gloomily staring at some ambitious mint which had just made its appearance. The attitude was unfortunate since it disclosed a rip in the shiny shoulder of his coat. His hair straggled untidily over his collar; a stray sunbeam showed how gray it was growing. Mathilde looked at him a moment before speaking. "So mother has sold the restaurant, father?" 66 Yes, confound her!" answered Harden, whose shoulders had shrunk together at the sound of her voice, much like those of a dog that expects a blow. "She's got a thousand dollars and the Chicago restaurant. She's always been wild go West"

to

"To go West?" interrupted Mathilde, "to go West!" She leaned against the wall of the house; her father's downcast eyes could see that her hands were trembling. Almost shyly he took one of them.

leave us!" he cried, "your mother 'll run through everything if you do! I aint got the grit to stand up to her, and she'd cheat me if I had! Tilly don't go back on us, it wont be so hard there, Dick 's going to stay here"

"Mother wants me to go," said Mathilde, "she does n't like my running the restaurant."

"Law, Tilly, mother aint got no sense, you know she aint. Her father was a dreadful smart man but she was always flighty."

66

"Yes, yes," said her father soothingly, we 'll fix it somehow."

Mathilde went to her patés. She derived some slight satisfaction that evening from an interview with Mr. Wright in which she declined to be his wife. "Clem talked like blue blazes in the hall," Arthur who had unscrupulously listened at the key-hole said to Linda. Both the children enjoyed the whole affair beyond expression and Mathilde rose greatly in their estimation.

It had been arranged the Hardens should start for Chicago the subsequent Monday. A busy week succeeded, too busy for Mathilde to go to church Wednesday evening, but she looked forward to Sunday, saying to herself that once more, if never again, she should hear the only voice in this world which had spoken comfort to her soul.

constantly. Until the last moment Mathilde dreaded some unforeseen detention which should prevent her going, but none came and she went.

The usher at the west door had grown familiar with the slender and round-shouldered figure in brown; he gave Mathilde a nod and smile as she passed. "You'll have your choice of seats to-day," he said; she was glad he gave her this little greeting.

It was so early that she was able to find a good seat. Gradually the church filled. The organ began to play soft chords like wandering thoughts, swelling at last into a noble harmony.

Mathilde bent her head; she did not pray but a feeling of awe and mysterious hope possessed her.

The last echoes of the music died into calm. There was the rustle of the rising of a great congregation. "Now he has come into the chancel," thought Mathilde who remained sitting, "when he speaks I will get up. Now

She was sitting in the shade and she held her prayer-book up before her face while the hot tears rolled down her cheeks. They left her with a queer, faint sensation. She lifted her dull and heavy eyes to the beautiful May sky. A feeling of unbearable desolation closed down upon her. She was like a lost swimmer in night and storm, who battles his way towards the shore revealed by a single light; when suddenly the wind strikes it dead!

In such moments the soul does not reason, she only stretches out her hands for help. Mathilde had sunk back in her seat. The children were chasing each other among the flower beds, the nurse-maids gossiped, and the men on the bridge discussed Dennis Kearney. She heard yet did not hear them; her mind was groping feebly through the past for some recollection which might give her strength for the future.

Suddenly, sharply, Mathilde raised her head. Mr. Rivers was not in the chancel! A slight, blonde young man whose voice had an ecclesiastical cadence stood there alone.

Some one behind Mathilde whispered to her next neighbor. "Did n't you know?" The answer came back, "Mr. Rivers is in New York, won't be back before next Sunday." Next Sunday Mathilde would be in Chicago. She rose softly and went away. At the church door she saw the usher whom she knew, and when he asked her sympathetically if she were ill she answered with a smile that she only needed the fresh air. She walked along the quiet streets until she came to the park which lies in the heart of the city. Mathilde seated herself on a rustic bench near the miniature lake. To-day there were no boats on the water, but nurses were wheeling their charges among the trees and a few laboring men in their Sunday clothes stood on the little bridge, leaning over the railing and laughing at each other's jokes. Mathilde, looking at it all, felt her throat contract and her eyes grow dim.

clouds melted into an ocean of blue. Insensibly the tranquil beauty of the scene stole like an answer of comfort into her heart. Behind all this loveliness was there not some love? Weeks before Mr. Rivers had preached a sermon in which he spoke of those things which men can do without; one sentence came to Mathilde now, impelled by a new force. Health, companionship, life itself; these are no longer indispensable when Christ has shown us God!" With an overpowering emotion she raised

her eyes. "Oh, I don't know how to pray!" cried Mathilde's heart dumbly. "I never prayed in my life, but I am so weak, you are so strong! Help me!"

Was it the reaction on herself of her own blind aspirations towards that lofty peace which only loyalty to the highest we know ever brings? Or was it an influence not herself answering her prayer as it answers every humble and trusting soul?

Mathilde did not try to decide, but rose, cast one farewell glance at All Saints' towers, and calmly, almost gladly, went her way back to toil and pain and unpraised victory. Octave Thanet.

The creed of the Christian church had a first and creative period-a heroic age. The unsystematic and crude teaching of the New Testament was thrown into the philosophic consciousness of the early believers for elaboration. And the process of its logical unfolding and arrangement was by no means a mere matter of abstract speculation. The fires of controversy that burned so high in the closing years of the third, and the major part of the fourth century were fed by something more combustible than simple intellectual interest. The questions so virulently debated were felt to touch the vital truth on which the church was founded, and accordingly the early disputants struggled as for their lives. It was not the interpretation of one school against another; it was not the opinion of one Father against another; it was the question whether the church should be rent into suicidal factions, whether the unity which had been the desire of the apostles and the dream of the saints should sink into a meaningless name. And the great results of this early contest go far towards palliating, if they do not justify its bitterness. The teachings as to the Person of Christ and his relation to God which emerged, clear-cut and sharply-molded, from the fusion of the scattered Biblical statements in the heat of earnest and expectant enquiry, have held their place in the church formularies with scarce a shadow of dissent. Indeed, and we say this with no deference to the benumbing optimism which thinks "whatever is, is right," to one who is convinced that the intellectual progress of Christianity as it finds expression in creeds,has not been subject to a guidance that is wholly of the earth, it will cause great hesitation in at tacking any doctrine if, in its essentials, it can be shown to be the normal product of the healthy Christian consciousness laying hold of revealed truth. It was this suitable reverence for the divine element in develop ing principles of belief, and no mere bowing to authority, that led the creed-makers of the Reformation to accept almost wholly

the doctrinal legacy of the early church, while making sturdy protests against its entailment of ecclesiastical abuses. But when we come to the distinctive features of the creeds of the Reformers we find them originating in quite another way. We may not agree with those who wish to regard Protestantism as a special creation, and not rather as a birth under divinely-ordered conditions. We may think Huss and Wycliffe sure pledges of a coming Luther, and Savonarola, half-monk, half-prophet, the very voice crying in the wilderness before him. We may see, with Dorner, in the mysticism into which devout souls fled as a refuge from oppressive Romish formualism, in the revival of classic learning and the spread of general education, the streakings in the east which were heralds of the full dawn of the Reformation. Yet must we not shut our eyes to the fact that Protestant Theology as distinct from Protestant principles, and as compared with the Theology of the early church, was of hasty formation. Luther himself left no systematic formula of belief. It was enough for him that he had wrought out in the groans and tears of his own experience, that great truth which he could best express by the phrase Justification by Faith. He was content to leave the development of systems to others, if he might but infuse into the hearts of his fellow-countrymen something of his own zeal for that principle which was for him central to all Revelation. Accordingly he made it the theme of sermon and epistle and treatise; who are we to blame him if he carried it to indefensible extremes? A severely logical and nicely balanced mind would never have nailed the ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church-door. But definite symbols of belief were an absolute necessity for the early Protestants, who were united in little else than hostility to Rome. They needed a Confession of Faith to bind them into a unity; and scholars were not wanting to supply the lack. The gentle and learned Melanchthon received the rough-hewn thoughts of Luther into his

own more exact and dispassionate mind, and gave them forth in coherent form as the vivifying symbol of the German church. In France the sterner and more profound if less lovable Calvin was meditating the system of theology which, however harsh in many particulars, has proved, as he hoped, the strongest rallying-point against Rome. He struck a mighty blow at the proudest dogma of Catholic theology-the assertion of a Divine authority in the church. Men cried: "How can we be assured of salvation unless we have the guaranty of an unerring church?"

It was for Calvin to show them how. For trust in ecclesiastical authority he substituted reliance on the authority of Heaven. No longer tracing salvation to the efforts of an earthly power, he carried it back to the councils of Eternity, basing it upon that will which acts before and above bishops and churches, with no variableness or shadow of turning. And this work was undertaken almost absolutely from the beginning. A few scattered threads were found in Augustine Anselm and Aquinas and woven into the new fabric. Occasional hints of other predecessors, of whom the world was not worthy, were eagerly caught and developed. But, in the main, the labor of the reforming theologians was not assimilative but creative. There was little or nothing of that sifting process which the distinctive doctrines of the early church underwent, before they were given the sanction of an Ecumenical council. The necessities of the times would admit of no delay for comparison and modification of views. The aroused minds of the people had stricken off one authority and were already growing giddy with their new freedom. If this freedom was not to lapse into license, some new bond of belief must be offered to bring them into progressive unity. It was under pressure of such circumstances that the creeds of the Reformation had their birth. Nat urally enough much that was incomplete or exaggerated in conception found entrance. It is not given to any one man or set of men to see the whole of truth. And accordingly the development of Protestant doctrine has proceeded on a method wholly

different from that, which is to be noticed in the formation of the creeds of the early church. In the latter case the process was one of slow and tentative growth. Individual and local opinions suffered the test of protracted and thorough discussion, before they found expression in an authoritative symbol. A creed was thus at once the result and the reconciliation of divergent views. Not so with the formularies of the Reformation. Given forth with all the definiteness and authority of the earlier creeds, they had not behind them the weight of a normal historical development. They were rather the prelude than the epilogue to controversy. The medieval church received the doctrinal utterances of early times as a sacred legacy, giving its best thought to their logical presentation with out dreaming of addition or modification. The modern church has devoted no little effort to a rectification of the dogmatic bequests of the Reformers, which touches their very subject-matter. Something of the methods, possible and actual, of this rectification it is our present purpose to exhibit.

It may be observed by way of premise, that the possibility of resolute attempts from within the church to modify the doctrinal teachings of a Luther or a Calvin, is the best possible proof that their assertion of the right of private judgment was not a mere name. It is a favorite practice with certain writers of the negative school to ridicule the common opinion that the Reformation, strictly on its religious side, was an enfranchisement of the human mind. What can you make it out, they say, but a change of masters? They point to the old woman of Geneva who, when a refugee from Lyons exclaimed "How delightful it is to see this lovely liberty in this city!" contemptuously replied "Lovely liberty indeed; we were formerly obliged to go to mass and now we are obliged to go to sermon." Though recognizing the element of truth in all this, the one fact that since Luther's time church dogmas have been admitted to be a subject for personal investigation and not matters of inviolable sanctity, is enough to justify us in abiding by the ordinary impression, that