ingly, purposely, and all without an angle. He is the impersonation of vital matter; the spirit of material wisdom; the living lava-stream of gold, the net-work of rubies. He has life, but not heat-fascination, but not love. He is the embodiment of material beauty, that lures and fascinates that fires the sense and deadens the soul. He is the god of the material, whose wills concentre in himself; and, one and all, he is the devil.

;

Now, the serpent, this god of the material, is simply a vertebra. Take this vertebra prone to the earth, this horizontal line of the serpent, and place the perpendicular to it, which is the vertebra of a man, and you have the image of the Cross. You have the shape for a man-a god, if you will. Thus, when the Egyptian-nurtured Moses lifted up the serpent, he symbolized the lifting up of the spiritual over the material. He showed, by an outward sign, whose import he could but shadow forth, that the upright or spiritual man must be lifted, and must cross the prone material man, who licks the dust of the lower senses.

The horizontal vertebra is a serpent. The perpendicular vertebra, a man; and here is the true Cross; and thus, in the One holiest and loveliest, were all these things exhibited as an outward sign. We have the agony of the sweat, as it were, of great drops of blood, in our suffering humanity; we have the feet that spurn the horizontal earth; the hands that grasp for the eternal, triumphant good-penetrated also with the anguish of the nails that would fasten us to the present and the sensuous. We have the dying thirst for

living waters; the presented gall and vinegar of worldly disappointment, till the very God within us cries to the Unseen, My God! my God!"

No wonder, I thought, that our people listen to this woman as to a prophet. True or not true, she utters her deep convictions with the reverence of inspiration, and thousands must and will believe her.

Bertha went on. "Nature herself abhors the plain, and she gives us the mountain, which is the Cross to it. Man, also, in his highest art, aims to raise structures that shall counteract the horizontal, and he flings the beautiful arch to span river and valley; the heavenly dome uprises; the taper obelisk points a finger upward, and the stately tower breaks the line of vision with battlement and turret ; while far back in the ages the infant man projected the pyramid to be like the everlasting hills, a Cross to the plain."

'But, Bertha," I said, "you are taking away all the dogmas of the Pulpit-you will leave us nothing to expound."

Love, eternal goodness-the life and sayings of Him who represented, in His own great, beautiful life, the ultimate to which our teachings tend-surely, Ernest, subjects like these are exhaustless. The true believer does not ask a creed, but only for those instructions of truth which will strengthen, and ennoble, and beautify the life. Tell me, Ernest, are we not stickling for forms, when we should rather seek for light? Do we not uphold conventional virtue, when the soul of infinite love and divine purity is hidden from us? Are we not as literal and as gross as the Jew? And do we not

persecute, rail at, and abuse those who reject the common faith, as cruelly and as vindictively as they?"

"True, Bertha; but these opinions were not yours in childhood. You were bred fully in our orthodox faith, I have heard you say."

"Yes, but I protested against these doctrines, even then. The spirit asserts itself always, if we are true to its monitions. I had an inner consciousness that rejected evil, and suffering, and death, as things that could not touch the soul. As I sit listening to Lily, I seem to revive my own childhood. I seem to see myself again, with my household of dolls, and I, enacting my little life-drama with these puppets. Strange spiritual and metaphysical teachings did these dolls receive; and they were a numerous family, each one being, as it were, an image of the state of my mind; hence I loved these little rag creations, made with my own fingers, and made a little answering shape to some soul-life of mine, better than the stiff, hard doll, of wood or wax, that sat in state, a great unloved fixture in my play-house. I revive with infantile delight these child-ideals, and the grave, intellectual subtleties I used to pour into their dumb senses. Oh! the profound abstractions, the dramatic episodes, and terrible passions of which they became the recipients. I was light as a fairy, and used to personate angels flying from heaven, bearing a gift-child for me to love; and I did love it, really teaching it all I knew, and training its moral sense just in proportion as I myself grew.

"But I am growing very egotistic," she continued,

checking herself, with a slight blush upon her lovely cheek.

"Go on; pray go on," said Julia. "I too recall my childhood, and see that what I was then I am now-my grief as real, and more oppressive, because I was more impatient of control; for from the first I was restive under authority" —and Julia laughed; but it was a sweet, timid laugh, which gave me a new phase of her character. But this was indeed a revelation of Bertha to us, such as I had never dreamed of beholding; and now I found it difficult to think that Bertha had ever been a child-that thought had grown in her mind as it does in the minds of others and I was well pleased to find this full-grown Minerva had once been a babe, and a growing child like ourselves.

"I pray you go on, Bertha, and tell of all your younger days and early loves," I said.

CHAPTER XXX.

Sabrina fair!

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glossy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.

From the realms of "Shadow Land"

I see thee mid the orient's kindling bloom,
With mystic lilies gleaming in thy hand.

MILTON.

SARAH HELEN WHITMAN.

THUS urged by us all, Bertha continued in a musing tone, unlike her ordinary purpose-like manner :-"I sometimes think there are tides, ebbs and flows, to the human soul, as there are tides in the air and sea. We are conscious of an accumulation of thought-of a steady increase of emotionas if the ocean-drift, as it were, forced by concentrate currents, impelled us, we know not how, or why; and we awake and find ourselves landed upon some terra incognita, unconscious of how we were brought hither. I feel a strange loosening of the tongue, which restores my childhood to me with renewed tenderness. Childhood is no more a happy