pted, misapprehended, misunderstood? Impossible! Such a belief
would confound and contradict all the attributes of the All-wise and the
All-mighty. There must be truth on earth now as fresh and complete is it
was at Bethlehem. And how could it be preserved but by the influence
of the Paraclete acting on an ordained class? On this head his tutor at
Oxford had fortified him; by a conviction of the Apostolical succession
of the English bishops, which no Act of Parliament could alter or
affect. But Lothair was haunted by a feeling that the relations of his
Communion with the Blessed Virgin were not satisfactory. They could
not content either his heart or his intellect. Was it becoming that a
Christian should live as regards the hallowed Mother of his God in a
condition of harsh estrangement? What mediatorial influence more awfully
appropriate than the consecrated agent of the mighty mystery? Nor could
he, even in his early days, accept without a scruple the frigid system
that would class the holy actors in the divine drama of the Redemption
as mere units in the categories of vanished generations. Human beings
who had been in personal relation with the Godhead must be different
from other human beings. There must be some transcendent quality in
their lives and careers, in their very organization, which marks them
out from all secular heroes. What was Alexander the Great, or even Caius
Julius, compared with that apostle whom Jesus loved?

Restless and disquieted, Lothair paced the long and lofty rooms which
had been secured for him in a London hotel which rivalled the colossal
convenience of Paris and the American cities. Their tawdry ornaments
and their terrible new furniture would not do after the galleries and
portraits of Vauxe. Lothair sighed.

Why did that visit ever end? Why did the world consist of any thing else
but Tudor palaces in ferny parks, or time be other than a perpetual Holy
Week? He never sighed at Vauxe. Why? He supposed it was because their
religion was his life, and here--and he looked around him with a
shudder. The cardinal was right: it was a most happy thing for him to be
living so much with so truly a religious family.

The door opened, and servants came in bearing a large and magnificent
portfolio. It was of morocco and of prelatial purple with broad bands of
gold and alternate ornaments of a cross and a coronet. A servant handed
to Lothair a letter, which enclosed the key that opened its lock. The