lowed one good man to
die, trusting.

The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished
convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever
is right in them will become: and no error is so conclusively fatal as
the idea that God will not allow _us_ to err, though He has allowed all
other men to do so. There may be doubt of the meaning of other visions,
but there is none respecting that of the dream of St. Peter; and you may
trust the Rock of the Church's Foundation for true interpreting, when he
learned from it that, 'in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh
righteousness, is accepted with Him.' See that you understand what that
righteousness means; and set hand to it stoutly: you will always measure
your neighbors' creed kindly, in proportion to the substantial fruits of
your own. Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter into
the faith of others, and to sympathise, in imagination, with the guiding
principles of their lives. So only can you justly love them, or pity
them, or praise. By the gracious effort you will double, treble--nay,
indefinitely multiply, at once the pleasure, the reverence, and the
intelligence with which you read: and, believe me, it is wiser and
holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired
religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves,
through the gathering darkness, and communicable cold.

MARY (_after some pause_). We shall all like reading Greek history so
much better after this! but it has put everything else out of our heads
that we wanted to ask.

L. I can tell you one of the things; and I might take credit for
generosity in telling you; but I have a personal reason--Lucilla's verse
about the creation.

DORA. Oh, yes--yes; and its 'pain together, until now.'

L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old error
of my own. Somewhere in the fourth volume of 'Modern Painters,' I said
that the earth seemed to have passed through its highest state: and
that, after ascending by a series of phases, culminating in its
habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually becoming less fit for
that habitation.

MARY. Yes, I remember.

L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the gradual
perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew in the
physical world;--not in any doubtful way, such as I might have
attributed to loss of sensation in myself--