“I suppose it would mean stagnation,” admitted Madge. “And yet I don’t know. Are there not forces moving towards right that are crying to us to help them, not by violence, which only interrupts—delays them, but by quietly preparing the way for them? You know what I mean. Erasmus always said that Luther had hindered the Reformation by stirring up passion and hate.” She broke off suddenly. There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, if God would only say what He wants of us,” she almost cried; “call to us in trumpet tones that would ring through the world, compelling us to take sides. Why can’t He speak?” “I felt it just the same when young Mr. McKean left us,” she explained with apologies. “He had been with us five years. He was like you, miss, so unpracticable. I’d got used to looking after him.”!

“Good Heavens! What a tragedy for the man,” commented Flossie. “God knows I didn’t want it, speaking personally,” said a German prisoner one day, with a laugh. “I had been working at a printing business sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me, and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell the machinery to keep them all from starving.”

He did not reply to her question. “Master or Mistress Eminent Artist,” he said; “intends to retire from his or her particular stage, whatever it may be. That paragraph ought always to be put among the obituary notices.” “I had to see our solicitor one morning,” he explained, “when I was secretary to a miners’ union up north. A point had arisen concerning the legality of certain payments. It was a matter of vast importance to us; but he didn’t seem to be taking any interest, and suddenly he jumped up. ‘I’m sorry, Phillips,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a big trouble of my own on at home—I guess you know what—and I don’t seem to care a damn about yours. You’d better see Delauny, if you’re in a hurry.’ And I did.” Looking back it was easy enough to smile, but the agony of many nights when she had lain awake for hours battling with her childish terrors had left a burning sense of anger in Joan’s heart. Poor mazed, bewildered Mrs. Munday, preaching the eternal damnation of the wicked—who had loved her, who had only thought to do her duty, the blame was not hers. But that a religion capable of inflicting such suffering upon the innocent should still be preached; maintained by the State! That its educated followers no longer believed in a physical Hell, that its more advanced clergy had entered into a conspiracy of silence on the subject was no answer. The great mass of the people were not educated. Official Christendom in every country still preached the everlasting torture of the majority of the human race as a well thought out part of the Creator’s scheme. No leader had been bold enough to come forward and denounce it as an insult to his God. As one grew older, kindly mother Nature, ever seeking to ease the self-inflicted burdens of her foolish brood, gave one forgetfulness, insensibility. The condemned criminal puts the thought of the gallows away from him as long as may be: eats, and sleeps and even jokes. Man’s soul grows pachydermoid. But the children! Their sensitive brains exposed to every cruel breath. No philosophic doubt permitted to them. No learned disputation on the relationship between the literal and the allegorical for the easing of their frenzied fears. How many million tiny white-faced figures scattered over Christian Europe and America, stared out each night into a vision of black horror; how many million tiny hands clutched wildly at the bedclothes. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, if they had done their duty, would have prosecuted before now the Archbishop of Canterbury.