‘You were brought up in that gloomy faith--the faith of that hard good man who had love and mercy neither for himself nor his fellow-men--who put an honest woman in jail for dancing at her kinsman’s wedding--and condemned a brother theologian to the stake for differing in opinion with him. Well, I can hardly wonder that your mind has taken a distorted view of Christianity, for though a Calvinist may be a very good man, I doubt his being a pleasant man, or being able to make his faith sweet and pleasant to others. But if you will accept Christ’s Christianity for your guide--if you will look to Christ’s heaven as your goal--you will find no thorns in your path.’ And then, warming with his subject, Cyril spoke strongly and earnestly of gospel truth as he believed it--the unsophisticated teaching of Christ. Emmanuel Joyce listened, and liked to hear, but his opinions were not to be shaken in an evening. He had too long cherished and cosseted the demon of infidelity, to be able to thrust the foul fiend out of doors at a moment’s warning. ‘Come whenever you can spare an hour,’ he said, when Cyril was going away. ‘I like to hear you talk.’ ‘I will come as often as I can; but on one condition.’ ‘Name it.’ ‘That you come to church.’ ‘I’ll come to hear you preach. I’m never above hearing a good preacher.’ ‘Come, that you may learn to pray,’ answered Cyril. ‘Life is a barren waste without that link between earth and heaven--the Jacob’s ladder of prayer, upon which angels are continually ascending and descending.’ CHAPTER XVII. THE ONLY SON OF HIS MOTHER. AFTER that first interview Cyril saw Emmanuel Joyce often. His duty took him nearly every day to that fœtid alley where the cobbler contrived to grow his flowers, and to maintain a semblance of prettiness in his narrow dwelling. Whenever the curate had half an hour to spare in his daily round he spent it with Emmanuel, and their talk was generally of spiritual things; for, like most unbelievers, Joyce loved to discuss the religion he pretended to abjure. One day when Emmanuel had quoted one of the most appalling passages in ‘Queen Mab,’ Cyril startled him by asking,-- ‘Do you know that Shelley was a lad of eighteen when he wrote those lines, and that the poem was published without his consent? You quote it to sustain your arguments with as much confidence as if it were the work of wisdom as mature as Bacon’s or Pascal’s.’ Emmanuel blushed. ‘He was a boy in years, perhaps, but a man in genius,’ he said. ‘Granted. Shelley was a marvellous boy, with all Chatterton’s precocity, and much more than Chatterton’s spirituality. If the light of his genius led him astray, it was not the less light from heaven. I doubt not if Shelley had lived to be old he would have learned to believe in much that seemed foolishness to his young imagination. Do you ever read Tennyson?’ ‘Tennyson is too tame for me.’