I shuddered, yet I still went on with my queries--I thought I could not know too much. I said, “But, my brother, the religious exercises in which you were constantly engaged, must have imperceptibly instilled something of their spirit into you?--is it not so? You must have passed from the forms of religion into its spirit ultimately?--is it not so, my brother? Speak on the faith of a dying man. May I have such a hope! I would undergo any thing--any thing, to obtain it.” “There is no such hope,” said the dying man, “deceive not yourself with it. The repetition of religious duties, without the feeling or spirit of religion, produces an incurable callosity of heart. There are not more irreligious people to be found on earth than those who are occupied always in its _externals_. I verily believe half our lay-brothers to be Atheists. I have heard and read something of those whom we call heretics. They have people to open their pews, (shocking profanation you will call it, to sell seats in the house of God, and you are right), they have people to ring bells when their dead are to be interred; and these wretches have no other indication of religion to give, but watching during the whole time of service, (in which their duties forbid them to partake), for the fees which they extort, and dropping upon their knees, ejaculating the names of Christ and God, amid the rattling of the pew-doors, which always operates on their associations, and makes them bound from their knees to gape for a hundredth part of the silver for which Judas sold his Saviour and himself. Then their bell-ringers--one would imagine _death might humanize them_. Oh! no such thing--they _extort money in proportion to the depth of the grave_. And the bell-ringer, the sexton, and the survivors, fight sometimes a manual battle over the senseless remains, whose torpidity is the most potent and silent reproach to this unnatural conflict.” I knew nothing of this, but I grasped at his former words, “You die, then, without hope or confidence?” He was silent. “Yet you urged me by eloquence almost divine, by a miracle verified before my own eyes.” He laughed. There is something very horrible in the laugh of a dying man: Hovering on the verge of both worlds, he seems to give the lie to both, and proclaim the enjoyments of one, and the hopes of another, alike an imposture. “I performed that miracle myself,” he said with all the calmness, and, alas! something of the triumph of a deliberate impostor. “I knew the reservoir by which the fountain was supplied--by consent of the Superior it was drawn off in the course of the night. We worked hard at it, and laughed at your credulity every pump we drew.” “But the tree--” “I was in possession of some chemical secrets--I have not time to disclose them now--I scattered a certain fluid over the leaves of the poplar that night, and they _appeared_ withered by the morning--go look at them a fortnight hence, and you will