The silent clock, with no life of moving hands on its dust-covered face, spoke of how the short and simple annals of the poor had been measured by it, how it had timed the marriage and the funeral, the birth and death; and how it had missed the toil-hardened hands that used to wind it up, every night. And so on--the dirge of the Household Goods! As my eye ran over the items of the poor man's goods ordered to sale for the most worshipful Bishop Donohue--the consecrated disciple of Christ who didn't even have as much of a home as the foxes and the birds--I _might_ have thought of one or two blistering passages in the glorious old Code of Moses; I _might_ have recalled some of the bitterest of the words of Jesus Christ, against those rich, haughty, unmerciful lordlings who grind the faces of the poor. But I did not: on the contrary, that passage in "Gath's" novel rose out of the mist of 30 years, and brought back the plaintive lament of the household goods, seized, carried away, and sold into strange hands to pay a trifling debt. "Gath," following literary tradition, most canonically chose _Jews_ to act as shylocks: it would never have occurred to him that a consecrated Bishop of Jesus Christ could sell the poor Christian's blanket off the bed, sell the bed itself, sell the table at which the family ate, and the chairs that they sat on. Not only the mattress on which the tired limbs of labor stretched themselves to rest, and the pillows upon which the aching head had lain, but the very broom which swept the floor, had to be seized to satisfy the rent of this godly landlord, _the Bishop of a homeless Christ_! To make this picture perfect, the family Bible ought to have been levied on--and this Catholic Bishop ought to have bought it in. Having acquired the Book in that manner, a natural curiosity might have prompted him to read it. One thing, however, the most worshipful Bishop might yet do: he might take the proceeds of the sale of Hawley's beds, mattresses, pillows, stove, dishes, comforts, blankets, chairs and broom--and contribute the whole sum to Foreign Missions. * * * * * * * "Thou shalt not commit adultery!" All Christians take their laws and their religion more or less from the Jews. Who the Jews took it from, is another question. Skeptical scholars say that they took it from the older peoples of the East, of the Nile, the Euphrates: orthodox Christianity maintains that they took it by revelation direct from Jehovah. Therefore, every sect in Christendom stands committed to the proposition that God Almighty, clothed in all His terrors, with the clouds darkening the skies, the thunders for His heralds and the lightenings for the flaming swords that went before His face, came down to Sinai, and wrote upon the everlasting tablets, "_Thou shalt not commit adultery!_"