CHAPTER IV.

FELIX EVERARD had been educated at St. Omer; and in that distinguished seminary he had neither been distinguished for his vices or his virtues. The original love of pleasure natural to youth had been in some degree checked by the severe discipline of the college; and he displayed no peculiar traits of promise, or boding, in his character, during the period in which his senses were kept under an austere control. He did not, like many of his companions, make religion a passion; he was a stranger to the entranced satisfactions that followed the long fasts and eminent devotions of many around him; and when he repeated his services to the Virgin, or knelt to the holy cross, and performed reverence to the enshrined images and the painted representations of saints, and apostles, which hung over the dark niches of the

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chapel, he felt no correspondence of solemn awe, or of love, or terror, arising from the adoration. He would often inquire whether this ascetic and melancholy life were necessary to salvation; he would turn with something of innate sorrow from the contemplation of a Creator delighting only in the penance and sufferings of the beings whom he had called into existence. He could not pierce through the mystery which represented his heavenly Father's mercy as so dark and uncertain, that his own salvation hung upon the intercession of a thousand mediators; nay, he found reason to distrust the redemption of mankind, when he found so many additions to the divine atonement necessary to his endless happiness, and so many human saviours in the calendar of his church.

It is true, that the priests of his order had in some degree reconciled his mind to the invocation, by representing his prayers as prayers to the saints, that they should pray for him; but the language of his church went infinitely further. He was taught "humbly to pray unto the saints, and have recourse to their prayer, help, and aid." In his missal he found, that

through their merits and intercession he was to plead for graces, and every thing that is the object of supplication. They became invested with attributes of power and omniscience, and corresponded with the dead men deified in the worship of Egypt. Presuming that they had this knowledge of all the created spirits of men, either from a Divine attribute, or by the secondary means of a revelation, his holiness or happiness depended on the exertion of their merit, and the success of their intercession for his soul; so that his final doom did not rest only on his conduct whilst living here upon earth in a state of trial, but upon a populace of departed spirits, whose voice might move a merciful God to pity-whose representations might influence the judgment of his soul in eternity. I say, such were the views which he took of the creed of his church; and he concluded, that if, after the great sacrifice of the cross, an influence independent of our own actions in life—an exercise of the will belonging to another order of beings was requisite to procure our forgiveness, that sacrifice could not be full, perfect, and sufficient. If the great Father of our souls was still too distant to be exorable to our

own immediate prayers-if He who had laid down his life for us was now so untouched by a feeling for our infirmities as to require the invocation of angels to represent our griefs and excite his compassion, there was something inconsistent and irreconcileable in the gospel of Christianity; and a conclusion like this could not but strike at the root of a Christian's belief and practice. A doubt of the efficacy of the divine atonement, however it may be produced, and a distrust or forgetfulness of the love of him who was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities, cannot but destroy that sense of obligation which, equally arising from our gratitude and our hopes, binds us to the precepts of our Lord, our Saviour, and our eternal and most compassionate friend.

Still, however, during his residence at St. Omer, he was attentive to the general rites of piety, and he applied to the deep and interesting studies of the college with patience and rigorous attention; he was temperate, from a conviction that the conquest of himself was the first step to the mastery over others; he was early and late in the acquirement of science, from the conviction that knowledge was power.

It was not till after some years that he travelled; and falling into a society which eradicated the thinly scattered principles of natural morality from his bosom, he entered into the most deadly vices that are indigenous to the Continent. When his father's death threw him under the guardianship of Mr. Harvey, he adapted his habits to those of the family in which he was as an adopted child. The heart had undergone a change-the passions were gradually and successively opening; that of pleasure, which comes with the flower of our youthfulness, had in some degree faded in enjoyment; ambition was newly set, and the time of action and fruit was at hand. He had visited the Savilles, and become acquainted, through them, with Mary Thelluson. One result of his indifference to the Church of Rome was the absence of all unkind or prejudiced feeling against the society of Protestants; and he became a more general favorite at the Rectory than Adrian Harvey. In the happy circle there he found much to engage his best and purest affections.

Mary Thelluson had not such personal charms as would alone have recommended her to notice; but she had appropriated to herself the