CHAPTER XV.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 310, 28 March 1879, Page 5

CHAPTER XV.

Although dreaming may be a very pleasant occupation for a winter twilight, it is not altogether in keeping with a blight March morning, when the still leafless trees and yellow daffodils are dancing in the brisk fresh breeze and merry sunshine. Dearly as Maude loved her mother's memory, before she had sat half an hour watching the picture, and weaving stories round every article in the room, she began to wish for Eomething to do. She tried the magnificent piano that stood in a recess ; but on that at least, Time had worked his will, and the result was such a curious combination, of discords, that, with her teeth on edge, Maude closed the instrument in dismay. She next took another peep at the altar, and there the two books caught her eye. Angry with herself for not thinking of them before she took possession of them, and returning to her seat began to turn over the pages. As the Ritualists have seen good to embody large portions of the Catholic prayer-books into theirs, many of the devotions that would have puzzled and outraged an ordinary Protestant were already familiar to Maude. For nearly an hour she occupied herself in examining the first book she bad opened, and was just proceeding to look into the second one, when a gentle tap was heard at the door, and Dr. O'Meara presented himself. " I am afraid I am intruding, Miss Neville ?' he exclaimed on seeing her alone, and he drew back as he spoke. " Not at all, Dr. O'Meara. I am very pleased to see yon. My uncle has gone to the station with Professor Broadview, and he will be back almost directly, and I am expecting Fanny down every mojnent." " I have only called to inquire how you all are after last night's late hours and dissipations. So you have found your way heie at last ?" he added, looking round him, whilst a somewhat sad expression stole over his face. " Yes, and not only into my dear mothers room, but into her books also—see;" and Maude held them up to him. "How well I remember them both!" said the doctor, taking them gently from her hand. " O Miss Neville, how often, as a boy, I have carried them to church for her ! This one especially ;" and he bowed his face almost down to the book he was examining, to hide the tears that in spite of his manhood gathered in his eyes. '♦ Poor deaT Lady Neville !" he murmured. " You seemed to have loved her so much, and to remember her still so well," said Maude musingly; " and yet you must have been young when-she left Neville Court." '• I was fifteen ; just the age at which impressions are most easily and deeply engraven on a boy's mind. But I had good reason to love her ; for what your saintly mother was to me, a poor motherless boy, God only knows. Few ever knew her real worth; your uncle, for instance, loved her for her sweetness and goodness ; but no man, unless a Catholic, could ever know her in the fairest, holiest aspects of her character." There was a long pause, broken at length by Maude. " I have beem a long time examining these books this morning," she observed; "and they have made me wonder whether, if my mother had lived, I should have been a Roman Catholic. Do you think I should ?" 1

'* It is not a question of what you would have been, but of what you were, my dear Miss Neville. You were baptised a Catholic, and for five years knew no other religion." " So I have heard ; but I do not mean that because a person's religion is not what they are born to, but what they profess in after years. -My father, as you know, was of the English Church, and would probably have interfered when I grew older. Do you thick it would have grieved my mother very much if he had done so, provided that I had been piou&ly trained in the principles of his Church ?" The question almost took away his breath, for at the very moment she spoke he was thinking of an old yellow letter lying in his strong-box at Killnew — a letter that, eighteen years ago, had solemnly bequeathed her as a charge to his father, "and which he had discovered a few weeks since in the secret drawer of an old escritoire, and had accepted as a charge tacitly bequeathed to himself. "How little she imagines," thought he. "as she sits there in the pride of her wealth and beauty, how stiangely her most sacred interests have been committed to my guardianship — to me, a man of whose very came it seems she had not even heard till yesterday ! Shall. I tell her of the letter ?"' he asked himself. " Perhaps not yet. I will wait till I know her better." Meanwhile Maude waited for an answer to her question. " Wo nuibt not suppose such a contingency as the one you bsivc ju&t imagined," he replied; "for Sir Morcar had given a eoleuni promise, even before his marriage; that all your mother's children should be reared in her own religion." " And yet after all I am not a Roman Catholic," said Maude musingly, " though ceitainly still less am I a Protestant. lam not surprised that my dear mother sliould have had a feeling against the Church of England as it was in her days. She would have felt very differently could she have seen it as it is now — bright, beautiful, and renovated. She would, I think, have died veiy happily could she have foreseen that I was one day destined to believe every doctrine of her Church, and yet at the same time to belong to my father's, and so form as it were, long'after they had passed away, a living bond of union between them." She glanced at the doctor, as she spoke, with a smile half sad, half triumphant ; but there was no response, not even the shadow of a smile in answers to hers. i She was surprised at his indifference, but continued quietly, | " Perhaps you do not understand this movement in the Church of England. Let me explain it to you ;"' and in glowing words she painted the dream of modern Anglicanism, finishing her picture with the ideal union of the West and East. " Now you did not know that this was my faith, did you ?" she a&ked, in her earnest childlike mauner. You have been looking upon me all this time as a cold narrowminded Protestant, have you not ?" Again her smile was unretnmed ; but this time the doctor answered her question. " If yon mean that 1 did not know you were a Ritualist, you are mistaken ; for your cousins told me so yesterday morning. But forgive me if I say that for my own part I should infinitely prefer that you should be an ordinary Protestant, for then you would have a better chance of being saved through " invincible ignorance," as the Churcfi calls it. You see I speak candidly ; but you have introduced the subject youi self, and it is one en which the laws of politeness must give place to those of truth. You just now spoke of youiself as a living bond, uniting the creeds of your parents once £0 conflicting. My dear Hiss Neville, they aie conflicting still, for one is true and the other false ; and to talk of union between truth and error is to talk of union between the living and the dead. Look at yotu position as a Ritualist from a Catholic point of view, the point from -which your mother would have regarded it, and what do you see? That althought the system you profess — modern Anglicanism — teaches you to believe in the existence of a Church, your mother's religion taught her, and teaches still, that from that Church you are cut off root and branch. You belong to a system thst teaches you to believe in seven Sacraments, five of which your mother's religion taught her, and teaches still, no one out of the one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church can ever hope to receive. You, Miss Neville, belong to a system that teaches you to believe in the sacramental Presence is not of Jesus Christ in the Anglican Church ; your mother's religion taught her, and teaches still, that that Presence there, and that if, in your later years, you have ever entered it at all, it has been as a stranger — if by chance you may have visited a Catholic church. You, in fine, belong to a system that refuses to acknowledge the authority of the Pope of Rome, while your mother's religion taught her, and teaches still, that he is tbe chosen Vicar of Jesus Christ, the supreme head of His Church on earth. "On what, then, would you raise this temple, in which Ritualists dream oi uniting the " ends of the world ?"' What could its foundation be but "the baseless fabric of a vision?" Whatman in his senses who considers the subject could, after ten minutes' sober thought, ever contemplate uniting any two of these contradictions 1 No, no, Miss Neville ; look into the subject for yourself, and you will find that there is neither consistency, harmony, nor beauty in your dream ; but that the monster you. would create would be rooie disproportionate, more heterogeneous, more hideous to behold than any fabled chimera of antiquity. I must ask you to forgive me if I speak intemperately. Under any case it would be hard to hear from the lips of iho nroprietor of an estate numbering as many Catholics as | yours the words. " lam not a Roman Catholic ;";but from your mother's child, from tbe lips of a child of the Cliurch baptised into her bosom — for such at least you are— those words are more than I can bear. Alas for mixed marriages ! God is my witness, I would compass heaven and earth to prevent one 1" . He spoke passionately, but the next moment checked himself, and continued in a subdued voice — " Once more lam transgressing ; but once more I say forgive me. It is difficult to say no more than one ought and would upon a subject upon which one feels as deeply as I do upon this, Is it peace -lie. tween us ?'' (To be continued.)