only ultimate disaster come from the contiguity of these two religious wrecks. Once she is honest enough to warn him that he cannot save her without more cooperation than she is able to give. She says: "Good women, when they need repentance, repent. They do the one thing I cannot do." Her past is as unescapable as it is hateful. The whole sad tale is a tragedy of moral debility. Pale, ineffectual ghosts haunt the darkened chambers where faith and virtue once kept house. "Enough, yet not enough" is the ever-recurring record. He has enough conscience to keep him from being content with an epicurean life, but not enough to lift him out of it; enough sense of responsibility to disquiet him, but not enough to nerve him to self-denial. He has an occasional impulse to pray, but his praying is like a man on the Brocken bowing to the huge bowing specter which he knows to be but the magnified shadow of himself projected on the mist. Such words as these are in his prayers: "I am not sure if you have any existence-you, the God I am crying to. Perhaps you are only a dream—an idea-a passing phenomena in man's mental history." The woman tells him to his face, "There is something wanting in you. You are good enough to make me wish for holiness, but not good enough to make me able to attain it;" and she says, "You love me enough to be made wretched by me, but not nearly enough to be made happy by me." Spite of his skepticism there are times when he sees that what we are and what we make ourselves is something of infinite and eternal moment, that vice and virtue are as heaven and hell asunder, so that space with its million stars is as nothing to the gulf between them. And then he sees God real enough and near enough to beseech him to cleanse this woman and restore her to himself. But the blandishments of sense soon obscure the spirit's vision and the prayed-for purification does not happen to the woman, who, herself, has power to prevent it. He longs to cast the devils out of one who tells him she has seven, but he is not at all inclined to the sort of prayer and fasting which makes a successful driver-out of demons. In moments of self-knowl. edge he realizes that he is a sham, and says to himself: "I am a brute, a dolt, and a hypocrite. Only two nights ago I thought I would lay bare my mind to God. My mind seemed to me a little rose garden of fragrant sorrows. I forgot there was in it a stagnant sewer. Ah, the shattered fabric of my whole moral

existence!" And this is what the loss of God through unbelief has done for a fine-natured and generous man. For a veritable Magdalene there may be a better chance than for Pilate if he rejects the Truth with a mocking sneer or a stony disbelief. The Great One said that there is more hope for publicans and harlots than for unbelieving scribes and hypocritical, proud Pharisees. There is something worse than even garments spotted by the flesh, and that is to disbelieve in the reality of the holy. When Vernon says all his trouble arises from having no God to believe in, he confesses a fatal condition. From slips in sensual mire one may retrieve himself, if only he has that hold on something above which faith in the Divine gives him. But if he has no staple or fastening overhead to run his halyards through, how can he get any purchase to haul himself up out of the mire? And if there be no God in heaven, who is there to reach down and lift him up?

The woman in Mr. Mallock's story is as miserably helpless as the man. She prays now and then, but it is to the Holy Virgin or to St. Mary Magdalene. She keeps a Bible at her bedside and opens it sometimes in the mornings, but her reading runs perversely and suspiciously to the least spiritual parts. She tells her friend: "I have enough faith left to make me miserable, but not enough to make me hopeful. My faith has lost its courage, but, like other cowards, it can still bully and terrify me. My life is bitter with the lees of a faith from which the finer spirit has evaporated." And she confesses: "All the holy things I was brought up to long for, and for which, till I had ruined myself, I did long-they seem fabulous or like wavering images to me now."

From opposite sides Ralph Vernon and Cynthia Walters have come to the same forlorn plight. She has been disloyal to the holiest things she knew, grieving the Spirit by yielding to the enticement of the carnal, and the penalty is to lose touch and sight of them. He has been disloyal to holy things by withdrawing his trust in their reality, and they have faded out of sight in the fog of unbelief. Both have turned their backs upon those things and treated them as if they were not.

Moreover, this skeptic, losing faith in God, goes to the very brink of utter sensualism, and this poor victim of carnal desires passes over into a skepticism as hopeless as his. He finds Renan and Strauss and other faith destroyers on her library shelves, and

she surprises him by saying: "It is not the masculine reason alone that is capable of skepticism. A mere woman may some times achieve the same greatness or have it thrust upon her. She, too, can doubt the reality of all she has held most valuable." And then she whispers shudderingly to herself, "How wicked I am! How shall I ever make myself good for anything?" O the curse of destructive books! No wonder an eminent master of literature writes feelingly of "the indelible stain left on the imagination by three words of Juvenal, or the discolored spot in the mind which tells where a poisoned arrow from the death-dealing bow of Voltaire had struck, or the pollution of a part of life by the elaborate literary machinery of that cuttlefish, Sterne." Worthy as Mr. Mallock defines his purpose to be, his book falls under Professor C. T. Winchester's complaint that novelists nowadays usually make the heroine "a person of undeveloped character and crude emotions, and often of narrow intelligence-a woman quite without moral or spiritual attractiveness;" so that "one sometimes fears that the good woman is likely to disappear from modern literature altogether. The hectic, ill-balanced, morbid persons that take her place are a libel upon the beauty and charm of healthy womanhood."

The supreme lesson of this philosophical Romance of the Nineteenth Century is that infidelity and sensuality are in ultimate effect likely to prove equivalent and to merge into each other; that whether you cherish unbelief or cherish immorality you abandon God and cherish a viper which will kill the soul. How, then, is the sin of the intellect superior in the last analysis and final result to the sin of the flesh? As they lie dead together, victims of the same foul beast of a man, how is Ralph Vernon better off than Cynthia Walters. When the Holy City is sacked and burned, what matters it to the smoking ruins whether the enemy marched in by the Golden Gate or by the Dung Gate? If the immediate jewel of the soul be missing from the golden casket in the inner chamber, what difference whether the thief entered by the cellar or by the skylight? We fear it is all one to the bloated dead man with the venom in his blood whether he was bitten by that spirited and sparkling reptile, the diamond rattler, striking high with dash and brilliance through sun and air, or by the dull, dark, dirty water moccasin crawling in the black ooze of the bayou.

THE ARENA.

THE ORDER OF WORSHIP, AND THE APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION.

In the January number of the Review there appears an article entitled "The Order of Public Worship," by Dr. T.B. Neely, in which the successive provisions relative to public worship in the Methodist Episcopal Church are historically and clearly set forth. But little reference, and that only of a formal character, is, however, made to the apostolic benediction, which concludes the order of worship as found in the present Discipline. Its peculiar designation as the "apostolic " benediction, the special direction of the Order of Public Worship that only parts inclosed in brackets may be omitted-it being not so inclosed-and the further injunction of ¶T 56, § 3, that "at the service during which the sacraments are administered any of the items of the preceding order may be omitted except singing, prayer, and the apostolic benediction "—all these facts show that the Church lays especial emphasis upon its use.

Moreover, this emphasis is a continuation of the action of the Church from its origin; for the Sunday Service of Mr. Wesley provided for the use of this benediction. In 1824 the direction was, "Let the apostolic benediction be used in dismissing the congregation;" in 1864, "Let the apostolic benediction be invariably used," etc.; and in 1888, the Order of Public Worship then established-as also that of 1896-contained a similar direction, and the clause already quoted, permitting at sacramental services the omission of any item of the same "except singing, prayer, and the apostolic benediction." So that, with a steady, unbroken, and increasing emphasis, the legislation of the Church has enjoined the use of the apostolic benediction. This not only implies a belief in the existence of a benediction known and received by the Church as the "apostolic," but also implies special reasons for its use. Hence it is important to know what this benediction is.

And yet there seems to be a doubt as to whether there is, strictly speaking, such a benediction. Thus, in The Christian Advocate of January 11, 1900, the following answer is given to an inquirer concerning it: "But the compilers of the order of service appear to have had in mind some one benediction which they supposed to be known popularly in the Church as the apostolic benediction. For that naturally we turn to the Discipline, and find therein the benediction used in the liturgy for the Lord's Supper and the ordination of bishops, elders, and deacons. It reads thus: 'The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord: and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be among you, and remain with you always. Amen.' . . . In connection with the order for the burial of the

...

dead is another benediction: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.' Neither of these two great benedictions is an apostolic benediction, in the sense that the words are to be found in the Scriptures as they there appear. They came to us from the English Prayer Book, through Wesley. The second is found in 2 Cor. xiii, 14, in a much better form than in our order for the burial of the dead: 'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.' That is a benediction pronounced by the apostle upon the people. . . . Though no apostolic benediction is to be found in the Discipline, those in the Ritual, being apostolic in substance, and in part in phrase, and venerable by use, should be employed."

But, if there is no benediction distinctively known to the Church as the "apostolic "benediction, the General Conferences of 1824, 1888, and 1896 were grievously at fault in providing with much positiveness for its use in the Order of Public Worship on the Lord's Day. Certainly, it must be presumed that they thought there was such a benediction; else they deliberately and by statute misled and misused the clergy and laity of the Church and the public in general, by ordering its stated and continued use.

apos

We believe, however, that the General Conference, and especially those members in charge of this matter, meant when the use of the " tolic" benediction was enjoined in the service the third of the three benedictions quoted above, which reads, "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen" (2 Cor. xiii, 14). And for these reasons:

First, it is a benediction and not a prayer or invocation--a benediction, that is, a blessing, pronounced upon the congregation by the min-1 ister in charge of the service. It was the custom from the earliest ages of the Church to dismiss the congregation with a benediction; it is found, therefore, at the close of the service.

Second, it is "apostolic," being found at the close of Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians.

Third, it is complete and comprehensive; indeed, with the exception of the one from Phil. iv, 7, it is the only one that can fairly rise to the claim of the "apostolic" benediction. These two recognize the triune Jehovah, and the work of grace as issuing therefrom.

Fourth, it is referred to as "the apostolic benediction," and in terms of similar weight, by competent writers. Thus McClintock & Strong's Cyclopædia (vol. i, p. 747, article, "Benediction") says, after quoting the one from Phil. iv, 7 as that most generally used in Protestant churches, and tracing its origin in part to Num. vi, 23, 24, "The great Christian benediction is the apostolical one, 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all' (2 Cor. xiii, 14)." Again, Lange's Commentary