"For instance, when Olive and Dr. Antony were betrothed, Mr. Drayton led them into his room, and laid his hands on them, and blessed them. And that was the seal of their betrothal. Every Sunday morning, Olive tells me, when she and Roger were children, after family prayers, they used to kneel thus for their father's blessing. Sacred touches, holy as coronation sacring oil, I think, to bear about the memory of through life. But then there is this to be remembered. When the consecrating touch is from hands which work with us in daily life, they need to be very pure. No pomp of place, and no mist of distance glorifies the ministrant. He had need, indeed, to be all glorious within. "Family solemnities must be very true to be at all fair. I can fancy Puritan hypocrisy, or a mere formal Puritanism, the driest and most hideous thing in the world. "Then as to symbols and sacred art. What else are these Scripture texts, carved over door-ways, graven on chimney-stones, emblazoned on walls? 'They are not graven images,' saith Mistress Dorothy. But what are words but images within the soul, or images, rightly used, but children's words? Not that even as to 'holy pictures' and 'images' they are quite destitute. What else are the paintings from Scripture on the Dutch tiles in Mr. Drayton's room, where Olive and Roger learned from Mistress Gretel's lips their earliest Bible lore? It is true, they are chiefly from the Old Testament. But Adam and Eve delving, the serpent darting out his forked tongue from the tree, Noah and the animals walking out of the ark, are as much pictures as St. Peter fishing, or the blessed Virgin and the Babe, on church windows? What difference, then, except that the Puritan pictures are on tiles at home instead of on glass at church? 'They are for instruction, and not for idolatry,' saith Mistress Dorothy. But did not the monks in old times paint their pictures also for instruction, and not for idolatry? 'Centuries of abuse make the most innocent things perilous,' saith Mistress Dorothy. 'When the brazen serpent had become an idol, Jehoshaphat called it a piece of brass, and broke it in pieces.' I can see something in that. The sacrilege, then, is the idolatry, not in the destruction of the idol. But alas, if we set ourselves to destroy all things that have been, or can be made into idols, where are we to stop? Some people made idols of the very stones of their houses, without any scriptures thereon, or of their firesides, without the sacred pictures. There are two things, however, which fill me with especial reverence in these Puritan ways. First, this sweet and sacred family piety. Second, or rather first, for it is at the root of all, the intense conviction that every man, woman, and child, in every word and work, has to do directly with God, and that he, by virtue of being divine, is nearer us than all the creatures; that to Him each one is immediately responsible, and