The devil, the world, and the flesh! What nightmare summoned these up, and set them glaring horribly into the eyes of a peaceful British subject? What had the devil to do with me or I with the devil? What were the world and the flesh? Take my father, now; what had they to do with him? Or Fairy? Why, her life was as pure as that sky that smiled down upon her with all its starry eyes. Let me see; there were others, however, who afforded better subjects for investigation. Whenever you want to find out anything disagreeable, call on your friends and neighbors. There was the Abbot Jones, now; let us weigh him in the triple scale. How fared the devil, the world, and the flesh with the Abbot Jones? He was, as I said to Kenneth, a very genial man; he had lived a good life, married into an excellent family, paid his bills, had a choice library, a good table, was an excellent judge of cattle, and a preacher whom everybody praised. Abbot Jones was faultless! There was not a flaw to be found in him from the tip of his highly-polished toe to the top of his highly-polished head. He had a goodly income, but he used it cautiously; for Clara and Alice were now grown up, and were scarcely girls to waste their lives in a nunnery, like my cousins, the daughters of Archdeacon Herbert, who adored all that was sweetly mortifying and secluded, yet, by one of those odd contradictions in female and human nature generally, never missed a fashion or a ball. Yes, Abbot Jones was a good and exemplary man. To be sure, he did not walk barefoot or sandal-shod, not alone among the highways, where men could see and admire, but into the byways of life, down among the alleys of the poor, where clustered disease, drunkenness, despair, death; where life is but one long sorrow. But then for what purpose did he pay a curate, unless to do just this kind of dirty, apostolic work, while the abbot devoted himself to the cares of his family, the publication of an occasional pamphlet, and that pleasant drawing-room religion that finds its perfection in good dinners, sage maxims, and cautious deportment? If the curate neglected his duty, that was clearly the curate’s fault, and not the abbot’s. If the abbot were clothed, not exactly in purple, but in the very best of broadcloth, and fasted only by the doctor’s orders, prayed not too severely, fared sumptuously every day of his life, he paid for every inch of cloth, every ounce of meat, every drop of that port for which his table was famous; for he still clung to the clerical taste for a wine that at one time assumed a semi-ecclesiastical character, and certain crumbs from his table went now and then to a stray Lazarus. Yes, he was a faultless man, as the world went. He did not profess to be consumed with the zeal for souls. His life did not aim at being an apostolic one. He had simply adopted a profitable and not unpleasant profession. If a S. Paul had come, straggling, footsore, and weary, into