in the letter, it belongs to the Roman Catholics; if in the spirit, it should be applied to those aims and ideas which constitute the real faith of the English people. The bequest of the faith of one age cannot belong to that faith which another age has abjured. Do the English people believe in eternal hell-fire, in devils, in the potency of saints, without which no cathedral was ever yet built? Do pilgrims swarm along the Old Kent Road as in Chaucer's day? Amid the conflict of sects, the surgings of scepticism, the only shores of belief, as solid as that on which were built and endowed our cathedrals, are popular education, freedom of thought, political liberty, and the rescue of the masses from pauperism, disease, and vice. Therefore, though to me there is left only a weak arm and a feeble voice, the last effort of both shall be made here and now. To the Church I bid an eternal adieu. And it is given me to prophesy the end for which I cannot work that a Spirit is advancing, which shall send those idle Cathedrals to follow their master in doing good; which shall scatter the Archbishops' revenues and thrones and vestments as King Henry scattered the jewels and gold of à Becket's shrine; and of all the grand establishments which the Universe has disestablished, not one stone shall be left upon another. The twelve centuries which to-day looked down from the towers of Canterbury, and saw the proud array of Bishops and Clergy, who leave the great causes and forget the heavy wrongs of the present to fulminate against stiff-necked Jews and defunct Pilates, shall be followed by an Age which shall look down from a loftier height upon Truth's golden harvests waving over the spots whereon they stand. All this I see, O my brothers, as this day I turn from the Church, with its splendid insignia, and come hither to begin anew the path of my ministry

where the Church began with the Saint dividing his cloak with the beggar."

When the old clergyman had ceased, he tottered and nearly fell. The two Deans, who had been gazing on the stained windows, sprang forward and bore him to their own carriage, in which he was driven away.

Sometimes I have thought that this scene, and the strange sermon, and the aged seer himself, must all have been a dream; but, again, certain burdens of warning that have since issued from Canterbury and Westminster suggest that others besides myself must have been impressed on that occasion.

ZÄUBERPFEIFE

DURING the famous trial of Saurin v. Star and Kennedy, I went to watch the case in the interest of a silent and unrecognized party thereto. The incident of most interest to my client was this: on the production of a scapular in court, the Lord Chief Justice requested that it might be handed up for his inspection, confessing that he "did not know what a scapular was." Has it come to this?

Running through the European mythology one finds, in many variations, the legend of the magic music to whose measure all must keep step. From the falling of the walls of Jericho before the ram's horn of Joshua, or the rising of those of Thebes to the lyre of Orpheus, the old story passes to the magic horn with which Roland, at Roncesvalles, called his warriors from afar, or the flute by which, as he reappeared in fairy romance, he freed his lovely May-bird from the wicked enchantress. Adopted by Christianity in Germany, we find the magic pipe making the Jew dance among thorns until his wickedness is

punished. And in England the same protean pipe is discovered sounding one of the first notes of Protestantism. "A mery Geste of the Frere and the Boye," first "emprynted at London in Flete-streete, at the sygne of the Sonne, by Wynkin de Worde," relates how the boy received, as one of three gifts, a pipe of magic power:

All that may the pipe here
Shall not themselfe stere,

But laugh and lepe about.

This original "Tom, Tom, the piper's son," did not confine his cunning instrument to making cows and milkmaids dance. He so wrought upon a Friar that he capered until he lost

His cope and scapelary
And all his other wede.

Was this profane lad but Henry the Eighth in disguise? Was his pipe the bugle of Cromwell? Whatever it may have been in history that made the English priest dance out of his cope and scapulary, we know what to-day represents the magic pipe, to whose sound all must move, and even mountains open, as they did before the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is the steam-whistle. This it is to whose shrill, remorseless note the age goes burrowing, tunnelling, bridging oceans, soaring over Alps and Rocky Mountains. The great steam-shuttles weave races and nations together. Can a people who travel by steamships fall back to swimming on a log in their religion? Men cannot for any great length of time be content to pass six days of the week in the Nineteenth Century and recur to the means and methods of the Year One on the seventh. The Lord Chief Justice does not know what a scapular is. Some successor of his will be equally at a loss about my Lord Chief Justice's Wig. And the dance must go on till

scapular, wigs, and surplice shall all be found only in the Museum.

Sharp, startling, by no means pleasant to the ear, is this steam-whistle, piercing through our quietest hour, invading our religious repose, dispelling slumber. It is, at present, too close to us. Only in its far echoes can we hear its softened tones; there its notes are spiritualized to the sounds they must bear to the ear of the future, when it shall be said, Happy were they who dwelt near the fountains of those strains that built our hundredgated civilization! Noises reach not so far as music. The horns of Oberon, of Roland, called men to war and dismay; but the struggles have passed away, and to us those horns bring only gentle and prophetic strains.

So pipe on, pitiless engineer! Assiduous thou only to clear thy track, and bring certain bales and freights safe to yonder mart; but even now, to the wild echoes thou hast set flying, the very dust marches into shapes of beauty. Above the bass of Commerce is the clear tenor of Fraternity. Lo, there is a music on the air, as of the breaking of millions of chains! From Italy, Russia, America, Spain, the echoes return in the happy voices of liberated hearts and homes. The dragons crawl away to their caverns. This one generation, with its vulgar steamwhistle, has witnessed the vanishing of more shadows from the earth, has seen more men and women disenthralled, more rays of intellectual light shed abroad upon mankind, than any ten generations which have preceded it; and, ere it ceases, that shrill signal shall swell to the trump of the Last Judgment, bring to the bar of Humanity every creed or institution of the earth.

BUNHILL FIELDS

UNDER the gray October sky I started forth to witness the formal reopening of Bunhill, or Bone-Hill, Cemetery. I passed by the spot where Cromwell after death hung on the gallows; by the old fields where the martyrs died, but where now the stately market stands; by the house where Milton was born, possibly by that where he hid himself from the wrath of the Restoration. "Milton, thou shouldst have lived to see this hour," when my Lord Mayor, and my Lord Shaftesbury, and members of Parliament, and noted Clergymen, are coming together to compete for the best eulogy and profoundest homage to the men whom their predecessors hunted to their graves.

Around the vacant space in the centre of the great city huge factories stood roaring at their work. Their brick walls and big signs frowned upon the vacant ground, seeming to say, "Why is this waste? This parcel of ground, with its idle gravestones, might at this moment be coining millions of pounds." But the commerce of London, surging up against the confines of the silent field, was there restrained as by a spell. Commerce had indeed made an effort to appropriate that ground, but had heard the command, Thus far and no farther. The religious hearts of England had gathered round it, and formed a sacred circle which no pecuniary interests could overpass. And the silence of this field loudest chanted the requiem of those whose bones moulder in it. For here rest men and women who, while living, similarly withstood those potent interests which recoil before their dust, when self-interest said to them, Sell us your souls; do not stand by a faith which brings you only a crust of