mortification to find that she had neither an
ear nor an eye for him.

Human opinion has so many shades that it is rare to find two people
agree.

But two people may agree wonderfully, if they will but let a third think
for them both.

Thus it was that these two ran so smoothly in couples.

Antiquity, they agreed, was the time when the world was old, its hair
gray, its head wise. Every one that said, "Lord, Lord!" two hundred
years ago was a Christian. There were no earnest men now; Williams,
the missionary, who lived and died for the Gospel, was not earnest
in religion; but Cromwell, who packed a jury, and so murdered his
prisoner--Cromwell, in whose mouth was heaven, and in his heart temporal
sovereignty--was the pattern of earnest religion, or, at all events,
second in sincerity to Mahomet alone, in the absence of details
respecting Satan, of whom we know only that his mouth is a Scripture
concordance, and his hands the hands of Mr. Carlyle's saints.

Then they went back a century or two, and were eloquent about the great
antique heart, and the beauty of an age whose samples were Abbot Sampson
and Joan of Arc.

Lord Ipsden hated argument; but jealousy is a brass spur, it made even
this man fluent for once.

He suggested "that five hundred years added to a world's life made it
just five hundred years older, not younger--and if older, grayer--and if
grayer, wiser.

"Of Abbot Sampson," said he, "whom I confess both a great and a
good man, his author, who with all his talent belongs to the class
muddle-head, tells us that when he had been two years in authority his
red hair had turned gray, fighting against the spirit of his age; how
the deuce, then, could he be a sample of the spirit of his age?

"Joan of Arc was burned by acclamation of her age, and is admired by our
age. Which fact identifies an age most with a heroine, to give her your
heart, or to give her a blazing fagot and death?"

"Abbot Sampson and Joan of Arc," concluded he, "prove no more in favor
of their age, and no less against it, than Lot does for or against
Sodom. Lot was in Sodom, but not of it; and so were Sampson and Joan in,
but not of, the villainous times they lived in.

"The very best text-book of true religion is the New Testament, and I
gather from it, that the man who forgives his enemies while their
ax descends on his head, however poor a creature he may be in other
respects, is a better Christian than the man who has the God of