off like the charge of a cannon he dashed, the loop of the collar flew out of the rivet, and the chain fell clanking on the paving-bricks. With grim satisfaction, the dog set off in the track of the horse for Scargate Hall. And now he sat panting in the cottage of the gill, to tell his discovery, and to crave for help.

'Where do you come from, and what do you want?' asked Bart, as the dog soon beginning to recover, looked round at the door, and then back again at him, and jerked up his chin impatiently. Insie, you seem to know this fine fellow. Where have you met him? And whose dog is he? Saracen! Why, that is the name of the dog who is everybody's terror at Scargate.'

6

'I gave him some water one day,' said Insie, when he was terribly thirsty. But he seems to know you, father, better than me. He wants you to do something, and he scorns me.'

For Saracen, failing of articulate speech, was uttering volumes of entreaty with his eyes, which were large, and brown, and full of clear expression, under eyebrows of rich tan; and then he ran to the door, put up one heavy paw and shook it, and ran back, and pushed the master with his nozzle, and then threw back his great head and long velvet ears, and opening his enormous jaws gave vent to a mighty howl which shook the roof.

'Oh, put him out, put him out; open the door!' exclaimed Mrs. Bart in fresh terror. 'If he is not a wolf, he is a great deal worse.' His master is out in the snow,' cried Bart; perhaps buried in the snow, and he is come to tell us. Give me my hat, child, and my thick coat. See how delighted he is, poor fellow! Oh, here comes Maunder! Now lead the way, my friend. Maunder, go and fetch the other shovel. There is somebody lost in the snow, I believe. We must follow this dog immediately.'

'Not till you both have had much plenty food,' the mother said; 'out upon the moors, this bad, bad night, and for leagues possibly to travel. My son and my husband are much too good. You bad dog, why did you come, pestilent? But you shall have food also. Insie, provide him. While I make to eat your father and your brother.' Saracen would hardly wait, starving as he was; but seeing the men prepare to start, he made the best of it, and cleared out a colander of victuals in a minute.

Put up what is needful for a starving traveller,' Mr. Bart said to the ladies; we shall want no lantern. The snow gives light enough and the moon will soon be up. Keep a kettle boiling, and some warm clothes ready. Perhaps we shall be hours away; but have no fear. Maunder is the boy for snow-drifts.'

The young man being of a dark and silent nature, quite unlike his father's, made no reply, nor even deigned to give a smile, but seemed to be wonderfully taken with the dog, who in many ways resembled him. Then he cast both shovels on his shoulder at the

cleared. His father took a stout stick, the dog leaped past them, and led them out at once upon the open moor.

'We are in for a night of it,' said Mr. Bart, and his son did not contradict him.

'The dog goes first, then I, then you,' he said to his father with his deep slow tone. And the elderly man, whose chief puzzle in life -since he had given up the problem of the world—was the nature of his only son, now wondered again, as he seldom ceased from wondering, whether this boy despised, or loved him. The young fellow always took the very greatest care of his father, as if he were a child to be protected, and he never showed the smallest sign of disrespect. Yet Maunder was not the true son of his father, but of some ancestor, whose pride sprang out of dust, at the outrageous idea of a kettlemending Bart, and embodied itself in this Maunder.

The large-minded father never dreamed of such a trifle, but felt in such weather, with the snow above his leggings, that sometimes it is good to have a large-bodied son.

(To be continued.)

IN SUTHERLANDSHIRE.

'How often and how vainly do we try

To paint in words the dying of the day !-W. B. SCOTT.

TOW the last streak of sunset is subdued

Now

By twilight, and the fainting crimsons die
Across the spaces of the western sky;
The rook is winging homeward with his food,
Down in the oozy sedge the curlew's brood
Have hushed themselves to silence suddenly,
As if afraid to startle with their cry

The listening stretch of moorland and still wood.

Day is reluctant to resign this hour,
And night scarce dares to take it till the shell
Of the high moon casts forth its miracle
Of perfect silver, and resumes its power
Over the wind, the sea-wave, and the flower
That folds against the night its weary bell.

THE VARIATIONS OF THE ROMAN CHURCH.

EVERY

VERYONE has heard of Bossuet's work on the 'Variations of Protestantism.' It is worth while to ask whether a similar work might not be written in a less carping spirit on the Variations of Catholicism. There are two advantages which would result from such an investigation. First, we should learn more properly to appreciate the worth or worthlessness of the claim put forward by the Roman Church to the exclusive possession of unity and authority. Secondly, we should be induced to regard the Roman Communion more peaceably and hopefully if we were convinced that, being a Church of like infirmities and inconsistencies with the Protestant Churches of Christendom, it has therefore like chances of improvement in the future.

We do not aspire for a moment to rival either the eloquence or the fierceness of the Eagle of Meaux. The subject is one which would require a volume to do it justice. But a few illustrations may not be useless by way of indicating the general direction which such an inquiry might take.

Let us divide what we have to say into two parts. The first relating to the Roman Church in the times before the Reformation; and the second relating to its present existence.

I. In regard to the times before the Reformation, it is important to remember that the Roman Church was, in many essential points, in a very different position from that in which it was left after the disruption of the Protestant Churches from it. No doubt there is an historical continuity between the state of the Roman Church before and after the Reformation, as there is between the state of the Church of England, and to a certain extent of the Church of Scotland, before and after the same convulsion. It remains the great trunk from which the other communions have been divided in Western Christendom, just as the Churches of England and of Scotland are the historic trunks from which the non-conforming communities of Great Britain have been divided. Leo XIII. is the successor of Gregory the Great, but in the same sense as the present Archbishop of Canterbury is the successor of Augustine, the present Lord Chancellor the successor of St. Swithin, and the present Principal of St. Andrews is the successor of the first Provost, John Althamar, appointed by Bishop Kennedy. In each case the continuity and the discontinuity, though differing in degree, are the same in kind. But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge also that the elements of Protestantism, which have since been drawn off in a large measure into

the Reformation in a sense in which they do not exist now. notice a few of these.

Let us

(1) The Roman Church broke off from the old Eastern Church in the same way and under impulses of a similar kind with those which led to the disruption of the Protestant Churches from itself. It had within it the instinct of change and progress, which in the Eastern Church had almost died away, but which in the West was sure to end, at last, in movements like that of Luther or Knox or Wesley. The Pope, as has been often remarked, is, in the eyes of the Eastern Church, the first Protestant, the first schismatic, the first Rationalist. In the predominant and separatist attitude of the Papal See was the first great infringement of the ancient historical government of equal patriarchal sees, which had come down from the fifth century. Under a like impulse there took place, in the Middle Ages, changes of such magnitude, at least in worship and ritual, as have hardly been equalled even by the Reformation itself. The two sacraments were completely transformed; partly, no doubt, from superstitious motives, but partly also from the onward rational inquiring tendency which belongs to all Protestant Churches. The Eucharist, which in the early ages was, and in the Eastern Churches still is, administered to infants, was, in the thirteenth century, by the authority of the Roman Church, withheld from them. No more severe blow has ever been dealt against the magical and mystical theory of the sacramental system. Baptism, which, as its name indicates, and as it was universally understood in the early ages, signified a total immersion, was also in the thirteenth century gradually begun to be exchanged to the totally different rite of sprinkling. Confirmation was deferred to an age of consciousness, and thus was transformed into a new and instructive ceremony, which became the germ, and also has received the influences, of the ordinance which, under the same name, has played so large a part in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. These are but samples of a tendency, which, having been often noticed, need not here be followed into fuller details.

(2) Another element of the Medieval Church which, if it cannot properly be called Protestant, is certainly not exclusively or peculiarly Roman, was its peculiar development of the genius of architecture. The great cathedrals which from the eleventh to the fifteenth century sprang into existence belonged to an instinct which after the sixteenth century entirely died out of the Roman Church, and which has been subsequently revived more actively in the Protestant than in the Catholic countries of Europe. There are, no doubt, in Gothic cathedrals some features better adapted for those peculiar devotions to saints and relics, which form the distinguishing features of much of modern Roman Catholicism. But the general

We refer particularly to the side chapels. But these are obviously excrescences on the main idea of the building which are quite inconsistent with the earlier ideas of Western Christendom, as may be seen in the Cathedral of Milan, and with the

aspect of the old cathedrals belongs equally to both sides of Christendom; and as regards their simplicity, their elevation, their subordination of the parts to the whole, are characteristic, as Dean Milman well observed, rather of the Christianity of the philosophical and rational period which the Reformation inaugurated than of the small minute observances in which modern Roman religion delights. It is a confirmation of this view that the curious imitations of the worst parts of Roman Catholicism, which has been recently developed in the English Church, are almost entirely confined to modern buildings, and have never taken possession of or been fostered by our historical cathedrals. And in the Roman Church itself the gaudy dresses of wonder-working images, and accumulation of ex-votos, artificial flowers, grottoes, and the like, are far less common in the ancient triumphs of architectural genius than in the popular resorts of modern pilgrimage or of local devotion.

(3) Another element of similarity to the Protestant character in the Medieval Church is to be found in the free-spoken language adopted both by clergy and laymen, before the Reformation, on the subject of ecclesiastical abuses. In the medieval literature there are about half a dozen works which have survived the shock of time and the change of fashion. Of these hardly one could have been produced in the Roman Church since the sixteenth century. The audacity with which the Divina Commedia' of Dante touches on the relations of the Empire and the Pontificate, the temporal power of the Papal See, and the vices of the clergy, would now be intolerable to the Roman hierarchy. The book on which he chiefly prided himself, the 'De Monarchiâ,' is actually on the Index. Chaucer and Petrarch would never have been regarded as genuine products of the Church in any time later than Leo X. The Imitation of Christ' speaks of pilgrimages in a tone far more Protestant than Roman, and soars into an atmosphere, for the most part, wholly unlike to most of the books of Roman devotion since the time of Ignatius Loyola. The invectives of Saints like Bernard, of theologians like Gerson, of scholars like Erasmus, against the superstitions and corruptions of the Church, which were all deemed compatible with fidelity to the Roman Communion before the sixteenth century, have become almost impossible since. Whenever such voices have been raised, in later times, within the pale of the Roman Church, they have been either immediately suppressed or regarded with aversion and suspicion. The spirit which animated them has passed across the border and taken refuge in those Churches which threw off the Roman yoke, and which, therefore, justly claim an affinity with these their precursors in the Mediæval Church far more deep and close than can be claimed by champions of modern Catholicism.

(4) Another mark of Protestant variety in the Medieval Church may be found in the incessant rivalries of the monastic orders be