666 His words will remain,' I And his example,' she whispered to herself. "Wherever he went men looked up to him,— his goodness shone in every act. His example "True,' I said; 'his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.' "But I do not. I cannot I cannot believe-not yet. I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.' "She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them black and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him. I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She muffled voice. "Forgive me. I-I-have mourned so long in silence-in silence. You were with him to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear . . .' "To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words. . . .' I stopped in a fright. "Repeat them,' she said in a heart-broken tone. 'I want-I want something - something -to-to live with.' "I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! the horror!' 666 'His last word to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him-I loved him!' "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "The last word he pronounced was-your name. "I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. I knew it-I was sure!' She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping, her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had ren dered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark— too dark altogether. . . Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I looked around. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky-seemed to lead also into the heart of an immense darkness. THERE have been few eras in which superstition has not found a congenial soil in the human mind. Unable or unwilling to rest satisfied with the plain teaching of religion, natural and revealed, mankind has ever been prone to plunge into extravagant and grotesque beliefs. It would be hard to say whether superstition has flourished more vigorously in ages of faith or in ages of infidelity. In the former, the disposition to believe much has made it easy to believe a little more. In the latter, the determination to believe nothing has, by a natural reaction, given place to a readiness to accept anything. Certain it is that no amount of intellectual "progress," no quantity of superior education, has hitherto sufficed to eradicate this most characteristic weakness. Even the possession of a a powerful and over - mastering intellect affords no trustworthy safeguard against the assaults of credulity. It is not alone the untutored rustic who dreads the indissoluble and mysterious connection between omen and event, or the ignorant servantgirl who expects the cards to foretell the complexion of her future sweetheart. Buonaparte cherished many secret convictions at which one can only marvel. Mr Parnell shivered with apprehension if the bedchamber allotted to him in a hotel bore the fatal number 13, or if he noticed three candles burning simultaneously in the room. Astrology, chiromancy, and kindred sciences survived the middle ages, and for aught we can tell many an anxious inquirer to-day is busily engaged, with the aid of retort and crucible, in quest of the philosopher's stone, or in seeking to fix the site of buried treasure by means of a simple suffumigation. People pay money to have their characters told from their handwriting. No fancy bazaar is complete without its soothsayer or spaewife. This adept is, as a rule, more polite and discreet than Cadwallader in 'Peregrine Pickle.' But for an adequate fee he or she is quite prepared to frighten nervous clients into fits by predicting evils imminent or remote. In private life many ladies may be found to read your hand with the perspicacity of of a Heyraddin Maugrabin, or to construct your ephemeris with the judgment of a Galeotti. They will discourse to you fluently of lines of life and health, of Jupiter, of Mercury, and, above all, of Venus. If Saturn appear combust, they will pull a long face, and their alarm for your future will know no bounds if Mars have more dignity than is rightly his in the cusp of the twelfth house. As for "scrying" in a crystal globe, do we not all know that Mr Lang finds therein his chief diversion after golf and fishing? Many of these are, after all, comparatively respectable pastimes. Astrology, for example, 6 6 is an ancient and venerable ago Christian Science attained branch of learning, well worthy to rather more notoriety than of the few pages which the its devotees probably cared omniscient Britannica' devotes about in connection with the to it. It boasts a dignified, untimely death of a rising literimpressive, and distinctive voary man, it may be well to cabulary, from which the lan- premise for the benefit of the guage of everyday life has not reader that, like so many other disdained to borrow. Besides, nostrums, it hails from the land it has supplied the materials of wooden nutmegs. It burst or the framework for many an upon the world in the year excellent story. Who has not 1870, and its founder, or archthrilled at the ready wit of priestess, is the Rev. Mary Thrasyllus, who, when on the Baker G. Eddy, "President of point of being put to death by the Massachusetts Metaphyshis employer Tiberius, saved ical College." A volume from his bacon by announcing the her pen, entitled 'Science and inexorable decree of the con- Health, with Key to the Scripstellations that the Emperor's tures,' and now in its one hundeath should take place exactly dred and third edition, is the three days after his own? Or textbook of the system. To unwho can forget by what a bold derstand and practise Christian and happy stroke Sir Walter Science it is absolutely necesadapted the striking incident to sary to procure this volume— his own purposes in Quentin Durward? No; astrology may be regarded with an amused toleration, very different from the feelings with which one contemplates some more modern eccentricities of belief. The close of last century witnessed the growth of many much more pestilent forms of intellectual quackery than mere star-gazing or fortune-telling. Since then we have had, to name no others, the system of spiritual marriages expounded to the world thirty years ago by Mr Hepworth Dixon, and the system which shattered the life of Laurence Oliphant. And now the close of our own century confronts us with a creed to which the colossal impudence of its author has attached the name of "Christian Science." Although some little time "First, because it is the voice of Truth to this age, and contains the whole of Christian science, or the science of healing through mind; second, because it was the first published book containing a statement of Christian science, gave the first rules for demonstrating this science, and registered this revealed truth, uncontaminated with human hypothesis. Other works which have borrowed from this book without giving it credit have adulterated the science" (p. 453). "Any theory of Christian Science," we are elsewhere informed, "which departs from what has already been stated, and proved to be true, affords no foundation whereupon to establish a genuine school of this soience. Also, if this new school claims to be Christian science, and yet uses another author's discoveries, without giving that author proper credit, it inculcates a breach of that divine commandment in the Hebrew decalogue, Thou shalt not steal" (p. 6). Animal magnetism, spiritualism, and faith-healing are all wrong. "They have no Christianly scientific principle" (p. 281). Homœopathy, it is true, is more indulgently treated; for Christian Science is "the next stately step beyond it" (p. 50), a compliment which we hope the homoeopathists will relish. But, upon the whole, it is plain that we are here dealing with the real old original rag-and-bone shop. All others are spurious imitations. When you ask for Christian Science see that you get it. No connection with over-the-way, and if the quality of the goods at that establishment don't please you, you are respectfully invited to favour ME with a call. Such being the pretensions of Christian Science, and Mrs Mary Baker G. Eddy posing in no less a character than that of a direct recipient of divine revelation, it is not surprising that the seclusion in which she lives should have prompted her friends to inquire, Why do you not make yourself more widely known? Her answer is replete with - modesty and self-respect. lously low sum of $3.18 per copy of the great work. It has always been the delight of Maga' to drag obscure merit into publicity, and this Columbian sybil is very welcome to the glory which will undoubtedly be reflected upon her from the following attempt to expound her utterances. "Could her friends know how little time the author has had in which to make herself outwardly known, except through her laborious publications, and how much time and toil are still required to establish the stately operations of Christian science, -they would understand why she is so secluded. Others could not take her place, even if willing to do so. She has therefore remained unseen at her post, working for the generations to come, never looking for a present reward" (p. 460),; We say "attempt" advisedly, for he would indeed be a bold man who should pretend to grasp their meaning and significance. Compared with these oracular pronouncements Swedenborg is the plainest of plain sailing, Hegel seems to err, if anything, on the side of lucidity, and Miss Corelli's patent system of electrical demonology presents a plausible appearance of intelligibility. If you listen to the ravings of delirium, you cannot help wondering whether you are in full possession of your judgment. If you converse with a madman, you feel your own reason begin to totter. Even so, you rise from this preposterous performance dazed and wearied as from a nightmare. The honest effort to detect a grain of sense in a cartload of such rubbish, to trace a consecutive line of thought amid such a parade of ratiocination, leaves the brain in the state so aptly likened by Mr Macwheeble or Mr Saddletree to "a confused progress of titles." Nor, her matter apart, does the author's style or language make much for perspicuity. To describe them both turgid is to use a wholly in-except, of course, the ridicu- adequate epithet; but it is as |
