consequence. Man is not depraved, and responsible for his depravity, because he has not-from nature to a certain extent, and from Revelation to a higher degree-the means of knowing God's will. But the terrible testimony against all men is this-"knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, (they) not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."

That the whole world is guilty before God can thus be proved, to a certain extent, even without Revelation. There is guilt because there is conscious transgression; the latter, because of the opposition between conscience prohibiting wrong and the vicious principles inciting to wrong. The Scriptural proof is the exhibition of this antagonism in a far higher degree. Both nature and Revelation concur in the mode of proof. One carries it out vastly beyond the other. The latter develops the real extent of such antagonism, by revealing the true character of God's requirements, and by unveiling man's real aversion to obedience. This similarity, and this dissimilarity between ethical science and Revelation, completes the defence of Butler's theory, by answering the concluding observation of Dr. Wardlaw.

"If," says he, "human nature be in a state of depravity, conscience, directly, or indirectly, must partake of that depravity."

This is quite true as a fact, but wholly irrelevant as an argument. When proved, all which it really means is this-ethical science is not Revelation, or that the Bible gives us information respecting one condition which we never could have derived without it. To deny this is Deism. Conscience has, beyond doubt, suffered extensive injury from the fall of man. But the question is not at all whether it does " partake of that depravity," as it most assuredly does; but, whether, even though partaking of it to a degree which it is obviously impossible for us now to determine, it does not so survive the ruin of all which once was "very good," as to indicate within certain limits what is pleasing or displeasing to God, and imperatively to require the one, and prohibit the other. Does it not, so far as it goes, coincide with Revelation, which at once transcends, and establishes it? This, surely, cannot be denied. Hence, then, the circumstance which Dr. Wardlaw thus strongly presses is, though true as a fact, irrelevant as an argument.

VOL. I.-NO. I.

THE CURSE OF HELEN.

CHORUS, FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES.

ILION! no longer now

"The Invincible" art thou;
Gathering as a cloud, the foe
Round about thy bulwarks go;
Thou art fallen, and hostile powers
Spoil thee of thy crown of towers;
And for ever as a pall,

Mournfully, thy broken wall

Thickening clouds of smoke enfold,Thee no more shall I behold!

Of the night's dead hour I tell,
When that trancing slumber fell
On my hero, newly ceased
From the choral dance and feast;
On its rest was hung the spear,
And in dreams he did not hear
Through the streets of Troy the rude
Sailor rabble's shout renewed.

Gazing on the mirror's gold
I unbound my tresses' fold;
When throughout the silent ways
Suddenly the cry they raise-
"Sons of the Hellenes, when
Conquerors of Troy again,

Sail ye homewards;" tremblingly
Then to Artemis I fly,

Thin-clad as a Dorian maid
At the altar steps I prayed.

Now forsaken and in scorn,
Desolate to exile borne;
HELEN to the Furies' hate
In my prayers I execrate.

Gods of Troy! for Troy avenge her,
Doomed to some fell demon's anger;
Helpless, homeless, grant her never
Fatherland or friend for ever.

C. P. M.

SONG.

AWAY,-for strange voices of music
Call me afar, and I stand
Where by the mystical Ganges
Lieth a beautiful land.

There are the forests for ever
Resting in still moonshine;
There on the calm of the river
Naiad-like lilies entwine.

Still floats the lotos-blossom;

Still stands the palm on high;

Still falls the breeze through the incense trees,
Breathing on that blue sky.

THE LIVING SECRET.

AN ALLEGORY.

CHAPTER I.

"Nulli penetrabilis astro

Lucus iners."

POET in the Latin Grammar.

TILL very lately Stillorgan was one of the least frequented of the districts about Dublin. It was not then of easy access to professional men, who require to be often in and out of town; it has not perhaps in itself any prominent attractions. Those who passed through its village by that Bray road, which, according to popular tradition, "had dust on it the day after the Deluge," saw nothing of its quiet green fields and hawthorn hedges, its quaint old manor-house, and, above all, that which in our opinion is one of the pleasantest retreats in which we ever spent a July evening in building castles in the air, for the peculiar accommodation of ourselves and of her who was the idol of our jibhood, the adoration of our Junior Sophister terms, to wit, that fine avenue of beeches and elms which once formed the approach to the above-mentioned manor-house, and which is called Stillorgan Grove. It is "no thoroughfare," having been cut off at the upper end by a road passing across it. The central carriage-way is overgrown with grass; on each side of this there is a long walk between trees where the boughs overarch, and the light is checkered through the leaf-tracery above as from clerestory windows. Often, when walking there, have we thought of that theory which derives the arches and aisles of Gothic architecture from the groves in which our ancestors used to worship; and fancied this very avenue the cloister of a cathedral, where the columns had been unpetrified and grown freer and taller, and the queerly carved leaves had spread themselves everywhere else from the capitals. The roof, too, is tesselated with bits of blue sky, after the manner of that in the hall of the new Lecture-rooms in the Park. But thou, O reader, gird up thy loins, and get thee to Stillorgan this evening after commons; there is but a slight fence (not one-fourth so high as the Park railings in Nassau-street) which the wildest enthusiasm of Mr. Guinness cannot expect thee to refrain from vaulting over: "Callidus juventâ" art thou, and

mayest light thy weed and call up before thee the ideal one, alas! from thee too how soon to disappear.

It was down the road passing by this avenue that, on a July morning some ten Julys past, "two travellers might be seen advancing." But, alas! they were not mounted on stately steeds, nor even on one of the Blackrock cars; nor can they be described as cavaliers, bandits, or knights of any kind whatever, seeing that one was a porter in the badge of the Dublin and Kingstown railway, carrying a trunk and sundry packages of luggage; and the other, a little girl dressed in plain mourning, the proprietress thereof. The girl had stopped for a moment at the gate leading to a large, sombre-looking house which stood by the roadside near Stillorgan Grove. It is there no longer, O reader, but lo! we describe it unto thee. If there were ghosts in that old house, they do not venture to show in the grand Swiss cottages, "cottages of gentility," which occupy its site, with those plaster-of-Paris walls, plate-glass windows, and perilously-concocted chimney-stacks, to which the Helvetii are supposed to be addicted. That dingy grass lawn has developed itself into a multiplicity of little gardens, tidy, with gravelwalks and green-painted ironwork. It was then surrounded with a stone wall, and planted with two or three dark trees,-no flowers; the house, a lead-coloured building of two stories, with long-uncleaned windows, and high steps up to the hall-door, was, as we have said, sombrelooking; the wheel-tracks on the path had been apparently uneffaced for many weeks; and we, the clairvoyant, alone can read the "Grove Lodge" inscribed on the gate. And if the young girl seemed to hesitate at entering, perhaps it was not only from the uncertainty occasioned by the dinginess of this, the gate legend, but from something in the forbidding appearance of the place that showed it was not to be lightly entered, nor, at least, without strong cause and justification for so doing. To all difficulties of locality, indeed, a solution seemed to be approaching it was one much in character with everything else there. Grove Lodge seemed to have "embodied and unbosomed then that which was most within it," in the entity which emerged from the hall-door with a sort of subdued slamming thereof. A tall and very ungainly adolescent of, it might be, about eighteen, walked towards the gate hastily, as if eager to escape, and yet with a kind of uneasiness visible in his appearance, as of one who felt by some mysterious intuition that every window in the house was watching him. He had reached the gate, which he was apparently about to shut with a stronger development of the slam-tendency in his nature, when checked by the appearance of the