stern prejudice of his people and his age.

CHAPTER II.

THE MINISTER'S HOME.

Sore have I panted at the sun's decline,
To pass with him into the crimson West,
And see the peoples of the evening.

EDWIN ARNOLD.

The Reverend Cecil Grey,--for such was our young minister's
name,--proceeded immediately after the service to his home. Before we
cross its threshold with him, let us pause for a moment to look back
over his past life.

Born in New England, he first received from his father, who was a fine
scholar, a careful home training, and was then sent to England to
complete his education. At Magdalen College, Oxford, he spent six
years. Time passed very happily with him in the quiet cloisters of
that most beautiful of English colleges, with its memories of Pole and
Rupert, and the more courtly traditions of the state that Richard and
Edward had held there. But when, in 1687, James II. attempted to
trample on the privileges of the Fellows and force upon them a popish
president, Cecil was one of those who made the famous protest against
it; and when protests availed nothing, he left Oxford, as also did a
number of others. Returning to America, he was appointed pastor of a
New England church, becoming one of the many who carried the flower
of scholarship and eloquence into the bleak wilds of the New World.

Restless, sensitive, ardent, he was a man to whom a settled pastorate
was impossible. Daring enterprises, great undertakings of a religious
nature yet full of peril, were the things for which he was naturally
fitted; and amid the monotonous routine of parish duties he longed for
a greater activity. Two centuries later he might have become
distinguished as a revivalist or as a champion of new and startling
views of theology; earlier, he might have been a reformer, a follower
of Luther or Loyola; as it was, he was out of his sphere.

But for a time the Reverend Mr. Grey tried hard to mould himself to
his new work. He went with anxious fidelity through all the labors of
the country pastorate. He visited and prayed with the sick, he read
the Bible to the old and dim-sighted, he tried to reconcile petty
quarrels, he wrestled with his own discontent, and strove hard to
grind down all the aspirations of his nature and shut out the larger
horizon of life.

And for a time he was successful; but during it he was induced to tak