above, assumes them, asserts them, and cannot be kept Catholic, or true to itself, without the fullest submission to them. I speak as a heartily orthodox priest of the Church of England; you will excuse my putting my thoughts in a general and abstract form in so short a letter. But if your son—(I will not say you—for your age must be, and your acquirements evidently are—greater than my own) if your son would like to write to me about these matters, I do believe before God, who sees me write, that as one who has been through what he has, and more, I may have something to tell him, or at least to set him thinking over. I speak frankly. If I am taking a liberty, you will pardon the act for the sake of the motive. “I am, dear Sir, “Your obedient and faithful servant, C. KINGSLEY.” It would be a mistake to suppose that the creed in which I had been brought up was or could be for ever cast away like an old garment. The beliefs of childhood and youth cannot be thus dismissed. I know that in after years I found that in a way they revived under new forms, and that I sympathized more with the Calvinistic Independency of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than with the modern Christianity of church or chapel. At first, after the abandonment of orthodoxy, I naturally thought nothing in the old religion worth retaining, but this temper did not last long. Many mistakes may be pardoned in Puritanism in view of the earnestness with which it insists on the distinction between right and wrong. This is vital. In modern religion the path is flowery. The absence of difficulty is a sure sign that no good is being done. How far we are from the strait gate, from the way that is narrow which leadeth unto life, the way which is found only by few! The great doctrines of Puritanism are also much nearer to the facts of actual experience than we suppose.