time of vast conflicts, which will pale into insignificance "the thousand wars of old," and, as likely as not, will whelm all the laborious advances of mankind in blood-drenched chaos. Yet to rail against it is as idle as to quarrel with any other force of nature. For myself, I can hold apart, and see as little as possible of the thing I deem accursed. But I think of some who are dear to me, whose life will be lived in the hard and fierce new age. The roaring "Jubilee" of last summer was for me an occasion of sadness; it meant that so much was over and gone--so much of good and noble, the like of which the world will not see again, and that a new time of which only the perils are clearly visible, is rushing upon us. Oh, the generous hopes and aspirations of forty years ago! Science, then, was seen as the deliverer; only a few could prophesy its tyranny, could foresee that it would revive old evils and trample on the promises of its beginning. This is the course of things; we must accept it. But it is some comfort to me that I--poor little mortal--have had no part in bringing the tyrant to his throne. XIX. The Christmas bells drew me forth this morning. With but half-formed purpose, I walked through soft, hazy sunshine towards the city, and came into the Cathedral Close, and, after lingering awhile, heard the first notes of the organ, and so entered. I believe it is more than thirty years since I was in an English church on Christmas Day. The old time and the old faces lived again for me; I saw myself on the far side of the abyss of years--that self which is not myself at all, though I mark points of kindred between the beings of then and now. He who in that other world sat to hear the Christmas gospel, either heeded it not at all--rapt in his own visions--or listened only as one in whose blood was heresy. He loved the notes of the organ, but, even in his childish mind, distinguished clearly between the music and its local motive. More than that, he could separate the melody of word and of thought from their dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the other. "On earth peace, good-will to men"--already that line was among the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its rhythm, its sonority. Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for the harmonic in thought and speech--and through what a tumult of unmelodious circumstance was he beginning to fight his way!