the matter, my darling?"

"Papa has been telling me that God hates me worse than a snake."

Poor, gentle, poetical, sensitive, spiritual, almost celestial Mrs.
Jonathan Edwards! On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived,
written down, given to the press, by the child's father; on the other
side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother pleading
in her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered husband. Do
you suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender soul of her
darling? Would it have been moral parricide for a son of the great
divine to have repudiated the doctrine which degraded his blameless
infancy to the condition and below the condition of the reptile? Was it
parricide in the second or third degree when his descendant struck out
that venomous sentence from the page in which it stood as a monument
to what depth Christian heathenism could sink under the teaching of the
great master of logic and spiritual inhumanity? It is too late to be
angry about the abuse a well--meaning writer received thirty years ago.
The whole atmosphere has changed since then. It is mere childishness to
expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any
minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than
when the father was of his son's age.

So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman
Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants. They
have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they
both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession,
the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,--these all inspire a confidence which
without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive
natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres
of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and
smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends,
and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no
wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence.
To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae,
of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place. If Cowper had
been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled
by a Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing,
looking upon himself as a castaway. I have seen a good many Roman
Catholics on t