"'Our master too!' do not forget to plead
For me, dear children! In humility
I will entreat him your meek prayer to heed,
That so his mercy may extend to me!"
Then, a hand laying on each lovely head,
Devoutly the old man the children blessed:
"Come early on the morrow morn," he said;
"To meet—if such his will—your heavenly Guest!"
To meet their pastor by the next noon ran
The youthful pair, their eyes with rapture bright;
"He came!" their happy lisping tongues began;
"He says we all shall sup with him to-night!
Thou too, dear father; for we could not come
Alone, without our faithful friend—we said;
Oh! be thou sure our pleadings were not dumb,
Till Jesu smiled consent, and bowed his head."
In thankful joy Bernardo prostrate fell,
And through the hours he lay entranced in prayer;
Until the solemn sound of vesper bell
Aroused him, breaking on the silent air.
Then rose he calm, and when the psalms were o'er
And in the aisles the chant had died away,
With soul still bowed his Master to adore,
Alone he watched the fast departing day.
Two silvery voices, calling through the gloom
With seraph sweetness, reached his listening ear;
And swiftly passing 'neath the lofty dome,
Soon side by side he and his children dear
Entered the ancient chapel consecrate
By grace mysterious. Kneeling at the shrine,
Before which robed in sacerdotal state,
That morning he had blessed the bread and wine,
Bernardo prayed. And then the chosen three
Partook the sacred hosts the priest had blessed,
Viaticum for those so soon to be
Borne to the country of eternal rest;
Bidden that night to sup with Christ! in faith
Waiting for him, their Lord beloved, to come
And lead them upward from this land of death
To live for ever in his Father's home!
In that same chapel, kneeling in their place,
All were found dead; their hands still clasped in prayer;
Their eyes uplifted to the Saviour's face,
The hallowed peace of heaven abiding there!
While thousands came that wondrous scene to view,
And hear the story of the chosen three;
Thence gathering the lesson deep and true—
It is the crown of life with Christ to be.
PHASES OF ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM.
A man with the peculiar turn of Dr. Temple[165] for finding results of the past in the present, might perhaps be inclined to trace the time-honored cry of the English Protestants, "No popery!" to the temper of Henry VIII., who retained the whole of the Catholic doctrine in his creed except the supremacy of the pope. A Catholic will with good reason see in it a testimony from enemies to the unity of the church through the successor of St. Peter. The historian will point to the fact that Protestants have from the beginning agreed only in one thing, hostility to the church. The Protest of 1529, from which they take their name, is the first example we have in history of a thing with which modern times are familiar—an arrangement on the part of those who, as the phrase goes, "agree in essentials," to act together for a time in order to accomplish some common end. In a similar way we saw Dr. Pusey take part in 1865 with the liberals, in order to promote the election of Mr. Gladstone as member for the University of Oxford. He afterward coquetted unsuccessfully with the Methodists. And last year he offered to join with the evangelicals in a protest against the elevation of Dr. Temple to the see of Exeter. Yet whatever may have been the case in times past, we should have supposed that the futility of such coalitions in these days had been long sufficiently evident. Dr. Pusey, we imagine, now feels little pleasure at having Mr. Gladstone at the head of affairs; and if the evangelicals had accepted his offer instead of rejecting it, he would have found out in the end that he had paid much for their help, and got very little by it.
By looking back to the circumstances in which Protestantism began, we find an explanation of its marked features—the variety of its differences, the fact that these find some common ground in the cry, "No popery!" and the inevitably logical tendency of Protestantism to dissolve into latitudinarianism. Of these the first two scarcely require to be illustrated; yet we may notice one singular illusion which has done more than any thing else to give a fictitious unity to the Protestant sects, and to invest their protest with a certain air of virtuous indignation; we refer to the common belief that the Bible is in some sense their peculiar possession, which springs from the doctrine that, so long as a man professes to get his creed out of the Bible, and the Bible only, it matters little of what articles his creed consists. This fiction has done good service in its day; but the Protestants are now likely to be worried by the fiend with which they used to conjure. They received the Bible from the church, and they turned it against the church. Now they find it in the hands of the modern critical school turned against themselves.