all I can say is that SOMEBODY ought to
be wopped for this!'

But one day, turning over, as hopelessly as he was beginning to turn
over everything else, a new work of Mr. Carlyle's, he fell on some
such words as these:--

'The beginning and the end of what is the matter with us in these
days is--that WE HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD.'

Forgotten God? That was at least a defect of which blue books had
taken no note. And it was one which, on the whole--granting, for
the sake of argument, any real, living, or practical existence to
That Being, might be a radical one--it brought him many hours of
thought, that saying; and when they were over, he rose up and went
to find--Tregarva.

'Yes, he is the man. He is the only man with whom I have ever met,
of whom I could be sure, that independent of his own interest,
without the allurements of respectability and decency, of habit and
custom, he believes in God. And he too is a poor man; he has known
the struggles, temptations, sorrows of the poor. I will go to him.'

But as Lancelot rose to find him, there was put into his hand a
letter, which kept him at home a while longer--none other, in fact,
than the long-expected answer from Luke.

'WELL, MY DEAR COUSIN--You may possibly have some logical ground
from which to deny Popery, if you deny all other religions with it;
but how those who hold any received form of Christianity whatsoever
can fairly side with you against Rome, I cannot see. I am sure I
have been sent to Rome by them, not drawn thither by Jesuits. Not
merely by their defects and inconsistencies; not merely because they
go on taunting us, and shrieking at us with the cry that we ought to
go to Rome, till we at last, wearied out, take them at their word,
and do at their bidding the thing we used to shrink from with
terror--not this merely but the very doctrines we hold in common
with them, have sent me to Rome. For would these men have known of
them if Rome had not been? The Trinity--the Atonement--the
Inspiration of Scripture.--A future state--that point on which the
present generation, without a smattering of psychological science,
without even the old belief in apparitions, dogmatises so narrowly
and arrogantly--what would they have known of them but for Rome?
And she says there are three realms in the future state . . .
heaven, hell, and purgatory . . . What right have they to throw
away the latter, and arbitrarily retain the