was to be seen at the play in the Elizabethan period. John Milton, among other writers, speaks of the licentious remissness of Charles I.'s 'Sunday theatre;' so that it is evident the abortive attempt at legislation against heathenish plays' in the reign of Elizabeth did not impose any check upon the character of the stage. To resume---the observance of the one day in seven, framed as it was by the Puritans on the basis of the old dispensation, has come down to the present day without a break in its retrograde movement from Calvinism to Judaism. As it stands to-day, Sunday presents the most exaggerated example of Judaism in the world's history. Of late years, however, it is noticeable that public opinion has been travelling on lines similar to those of the early Reformers, looking towards a demolition of the Jewish superstructure and a reversion to a simple Christian remembrance of Christ's resurrection, with increasing freedom, as moral strength increases, to the people. These recurring struggles between Sabbatarians and resistants, if a word may be coined, have almost invariably resulted in favour of the latter, the exception being where they have attempted to hasten natural progression, thus demonstrating that the sense of the people is towards a voluntary observance of one day in seven as a religious ceremony or duty, combined with liberty to employ the cessation from labour as free-will may dictate.

To sum up our historical retrospect we find that the Jewish Sabbath displaced the weekly cessation from toil; that Christ proclaimed the freedom of his followers from its observance ; that Christ instituted no substitute for the Jewish Sabbath; that succeeding generations engrafted upon a voluntary commemoration of Christ's resurrection, Jewish observances not binding upon Christians, save by voluntary submission; that this voluntary observance was made a yoke; that

the yoke was thrown off; that it is again re imposed at this day.

Let us turn now briefly to examine the character of the Jewish Sabbath. The religion of the Jews, unlike that of the Christians, had not as its inspiration a life beyond the grave. True, the Jews had an idea of immortality, but their undying life was the perpetuation of their family importance among the tribes: it was to build up and strengthen their 'houses.' Thus we find in the Jewish religion a vast amount of provision made for the regulation of the physical nature, even their morality being enjoined in such a way as to appear as if it were necessary to the maintenance of their physical robustness more than for the satisfaction of the desires of their higher nature. Indeed, beyond the one grand religious idea of homage to the great I AM, the religion of the Jews seems to have been a religion of health. So deeply did these provisions enter into the every-day life of the Jews that one is impelled towards the idea that the Sabbath itself was ordained as a health ordinance, quite as much as, if not more than, a day of worship. The more one penetrates into the history of the Sabbath, the more warranted does this impulse appear. We find Cox in his Sabbath Law and Duties saying: 'I have studied. the Fourth Commandment for many years without finding in it a syllable that prohibits recreations; nor have I succeeded better in trying to discover in it an injunction of the public and private exercises of God's worship, as either the whole or any part of the duties of God's Dav.' He is forced to conclude that if the Fourth Commandment enjoins aught beyond the mere rest which it specifies, it actually enjoins by implication, worldly recreations. Plumptre in his article, to which reference has elsewhere been made, says: 'As there is a divine activity which does not break in upon the rest of the eternal Sabbath (John v. 17), so there may be a human

activity, human work compatible with the principle of the weekly Sabbath." In favour of the opposite view let the following be culled from the Westminster Review: 'The leading object of the Jewish Sabbath was not religion in our sense of the term, but relaxation. Religion, however, was so far connected with it that the people attended on the Sabbath Day, whenever they could conveniently do so, the morning and evening sacrifices. The interval between, we may be morally certain, was devoted, at the pleasure of the individuals, to the miscellaneous objects of rational recreation visits to friends, pleasant walks, social pastime, the song and the dance.'

Wherein objection lies most strongly against the course of subsequent tinkers, with the observance of one day in seven, is that they took only such portions of the Jewish Sabbath as pleased their fancy, and engrafted them upon the Lord's Day. Every

thing that was austere in the Jewish ritual, and which suited either their æsthetic tastes or gave a semi-divine countenance to their own personal dicta, was extracted by the schoolmen and embodied in the Christian order of observance. This assumption of spiritual and temporal power, passing long without question, culminated in a tyranny which provoked the Refor mation. The character of Sunday had now been transformed into ultra Judaism, and it is no wonder that the sincere followers of Christ revolted from the imposition. Concerning this period, Dr. Hessey writes: Reaction from these views which set in with the Reformation was intense and even violent, though the traces of it have been almost entirely lost in the traditions of our modern Protestantism. For strangely, as it is unknown to the community and purposely (as it would almost seem) kept out of sight by the clergy in general of the British Churches, it is a fact, notorious and indubitable to the ecclesiastical stud

ents, that all great continental Reformers, and hardly less those of England and Scotland also, with one voice and consent repudiated the Sabbatarian theory, which is now the prevailing rule amongst us. Not only. Luther and his disciples, not only Zwinglius, as well as the intermediate school which laboured fruitlessly on the continent, but with more effect in England, to establish a position toler ant and comprehensive of the differences of these two leading Reformers, the school of Melancthon and Bucer, and Peter Martyr, but (what is too remarkable to pass over without emphatic notice) Calvin himself and the founders of the Church which adopted his doctrines and discipline, expressly based the observance of Sunday on exclusively Christian grounds, disallowing the obligation of the Jewish law in this matter as well as in other points of Mosaic ritual. Nay, of all those great Christian worthies, Calvin seems to have carried his opinions furthest, not unsupported by the lesser luminaries of his school. Were John Knox to return to Scotland now, his views on this point would utterly scandalize the ministers and elders of that Church which regards him as its ecclesiastical ancestor; and even south of the border he would be loudly condemned by the very persons who regard his name as the badge of the narrowest and most intolerant Puritanism.'

It is evident then, that the Fathers of the Reformation recognised a difference between what was man's duty in regard to Sabbath observance and the service which monastic enactment sought to impose upon him, an enactment which has since been supplanted by civil penalty. Summing up this discursive enquiry into the character of the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's Day, in the light of the Fathers' teaching, the conclusion that must unavoidably be come to is that what was originally as much a health provision as a day of worship, has been

I

WAS on my knees before my chrysanthemum-bed, looking at each little, round, tight disk of a bud, and trying to believe that it would be a snowy flower in two weeks. In two weeks my cousin Annie Ware was to be married if my white chrysanthemums would only understand and make haste ! I was childish enough to tell them so; but the childishness came of love, of my exceeding, my unutterable love for Annie Ware; if flowers have souls, the chrysanthemums understood me.

A sharp, quick roll of wheels startled me. I lifted my head. The wheels stopped at our gate; a hurried step came down the broad garden-path, and almost before I had time to spring to my feet, Dr. Fearing had taken both my hands in his, had said,-' Annie Ware has the fever'-had turned, had gone, had shut the garden gate, and the same sharp, quick roll of wheels told that he was far on his way to the next sufferer.

I do not know how long I stood still in the garden. A miserable sullenness seemed to benumb my faculties. I repeated,

'Annie Ware has the fever.' Then I said,

'Annie Ware cannot die; she is too young, too strong, and we love her so.'

Then I said again,—

Annie Ware has the fever,' and all the time I seemed not to be thinking about her at all, but about the chrysanthemums, whose tops I still idly studied.

For weeks a malignant typhus fever had been slowly creeping about in the

lower part of our village, in all the streets which had been under water in the spring freshet.

These streets were occupied chiefly by labouring people, either mill operatives or shopkeepers of the poorer class. It was part of the cruel calamity of their 'poverty' that they could not afford to have homesteads on the high plateau, which lifted itself quite suddenly from the river meadow, and made our village a by-word of beauty all through New England.

Upon this plateau were laid out streets of great regularity, shaded by grand elms, many of which had been planted by hands that handled the ropes of the Mayflower. Under the shade of these elms stood large, oldfashioned houses, in that sort of sleepy dignity peculiar to old New England. We who lived in these houses were also sleepy and dignified. We knew that under the hill,' as it was called, lived many hundreds of men and women, who were stifled in summer for want of the breezes which swept across our heights, cold in winter because the wall of our plateau shut down upon them the icy airs from the frozen river, and cut off the afternoon sun. We were sorry for them, and we sent them cold meat and flannels sometimes; but their life was as remote from our life as if they never crossed our paths; it is not necessary to go into large cities to find sharp lines drawn between the well-to-do and the poverty-stricken. There are in many small villages, 'districts' separated from each other by as distinct a moral distance as divides Fifth Avenue from the Five Points.

And so it had come to pass that while for weeks this malignant fever had been creeping about on the river shore, we, in our clearer, purer air, had not felt even a dread of it. There had not been a single case of it west of the high-water mark made by the terrible freshet of the previous spring. We sent brandy and wine and beeftea into the poor, comfortless, griefstricken houses; and we said at tea time that it was strange people would persist in living down under the bank: what could they expect? and besides, they were so careless about drainage and ventilation.'

Now, on the highest and loveliest spot, in the richest and most beautiful house, the sweetest and fairest girl of all our village lay ill of the deadly disease.

'Annie Ware has the fever.' I wondered if some fiend were lurking by my side, who kept saying the words over and over in my ear. With that indescribable mixture of dulled and preternaturally sharpened sense which often marks the first moments of such distress, I walked slowly to my room, and in a short time had made all the necessary preparation for leaving home. I felt like a thief as I stole slowly down the stairs, with my travelling-bag in my hand. At the door I met my father.

'Hey-day, my darling, where now? Off to Annie's, as usual?'

He had not heard the tidings! Should I tell him? I might never see him again; only too well I knew the terrible danger into which I was going. But he might forbid me.

Yes, off to Annie's,' I said in a gay tone, and kissing him sprang down the steps.

I did not see my father again for eighteen days.

On the steps of my uncle's house I met old Jane, a coloured woman who had nursed Annie Ware when she was a baby, and who lived now in a little cottage near by, from whose door steps she could see Annie's window, and in

whose garden she raised flowers of all sorts, solely for the pleasure of carrying them to Annie every day.

Jane's face was positively grey with sorrow and fear. She looked at me with a strange sort of unsympathizing hardness in her eyes. She had never loved me. I knew what she thought. She was saying to herself: Why not this one instead of the other?'

'O Auntie !' I said, 'I would die for Annie; you know I would.'

At this she melted. 'O honey! don' ye say that. The Lord' but she could say no more. She threw her apron up over her head and strode

away.

The doors of the house stood open. I walked through room after room, and found no human being. At last, at the foot of the stairs in the back part of the house, I came upon all the servants huddled together in a cowering, weeping group. Flat on the floor, with his face to the wall, lay black Caesar, the coachman. I put my hand. on his shoulder. He jerked away impatiently.

Yer jest lemme lone, will yer?' he said in a choking voice; then lifting up his head, and seeing it was I, he half sprang to his feet, with a look of shame and alarm, and involuntarily carrying his hand to his head, said :

'O miss! who's gwine to think yer' -here he too broke down, and buried his face in his great hands.

I did not speak, but the little group instinctively opened to let me pass up the stairs. I had a vague consciousness that they said something as I turned into a little cross-hall which led to Annie's room; but without attending to their words I opened her door. The room was empty; the bed stripped of clothes; the windows wide open. I sank into a chair, and looked from side to side. I was too late, after all! That was why none of the servants dared speak to me. A little slipper of Annie's lay on the floor by the bed. I took it up and turned it over and over in my hands. Then I