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best to be a good wife to him, only it were hard, Miss Di, never to see my own mother, and her frettin', and sendin' me scornful messages, as if I felt myself too grand to go and see her. Can you ever forgive me, Miss Di?"

"I forgive you if there is anything for me to forgive," answered Diana, and moved by a sudden impulse of compassion and grief she stopped and kissed Leah's pale face, which flushed with momentary pleasure. 66 Get up, Leah," she added, "and sit down here beside me. We have a good deal to talk about. My brother Captain Lynn and I have been thinking what can be done for you." "Don't do nothin' for me," she said, earnestly; "it's my fault as you are not livin' still with your father, and takin' care of him. I deserve to be punished; and uncle Fosse, and me, we thought you might let me be

servant."

"No, no," interrupted Diana, "we must not let our father's widow go into service."

mon servant-girl," said Leah humbly," and he only used to make game o' me; so it 'ud be no use me sayin' anythin', even if I knew how. But you're a lady, and he thinks all the world o' you."

It cost Leah a pang to own this in so many words. Though she had risked her life for Richard Herford, and was willing to devote it to his service, he thought nothing of her; whilst he thought all the world of Diana, who had never given to him a moment's care. She could not explain it to herself. Richard Herford had never been like Justin, who seemed to belong altogether to another sphere than hers. Richard had always chosen to associate with people like himself. Then how was it that he could think so much of Diana, and find merely a subject of ridicule in her own devotion and love to him?

"And oh! Miss Di," she continued, "his mother can't comfort him, no more than me. She sits, and cries, and wails by his bedside, and never says a word to cheer him up. "We shall have to live all the rest of our days in this hole,' she says, 'there's no more company for us, and no pleasure in life. I'm a miserable woman,' she says. Sometimes Master Dick pretends to be asleep, when he hears her come in. 'Leah,' he said, last night, done to bring my father's Justin says he took them off but they've overtaken me all I made him miserable, and now I'm miserable. Even my mother looks on me as a burden.' 'You're no burden to me, Master Dick,' I said; 'I love to wait on you.' But it was no good; he only groaned deeper than ever; and I heard him callin', 'Oh, God! oh, God!' like a child that's lost its way, and is callin' for its mother."

"Listen only a minute," urged Leah, "servant to Master Dick; his nurse, you know. I was afraid you wouldn't, perhaps, let me be, because I know I'm Leah Lynn now-old Squire Lynn's wife. But I'd never call myself by his name, and I'd never, never speak as if I'd belonged to you, if you'd only give your consent to me bein''what have I servant to Master Dick. He'll want some- curses on me? body faithful now that he'll never set his before he died, foot to the floor again; and I'd rather wait on the same. him than be the finest lady in the land. It will be a hard thing to have old Mrs. Herford for a mistress, after I've been on a level with her, and been her visitor, and I know she'll make it as bad as bad can be; but I'll put up with it, I will indeed, Miss Di. Master Justin, he'd be satisfied his poor brother was well done by, as long as I was about him."

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"I'm sure he would be, Leah," said Diana. "He groans and mourns all day long, and all night, too," continued Leah, with tears in her eyes, "it almost breaks my heart to hear him. Oh, God! oh, God!" he cries, hundreds and hundreds o' times. And I'm no scholar like you; and I'm not in favour wi' God, like uncle Fosse. He isn't any scholar, but he speaks as if God told him the very words he ought to say. I never know what to say to Master Dick, and I can do nothin' to comfort him, only smoothin' his pillow, and fetchin' him somethin' to eat or drink. If you'd come and see him! He thinks all the world o' you."

"I'll come gladly," replied Diana.

"I know I'm nothin' better than a com

Leah hid her face in her hands, weeping bitterly; and Diana wept too. It was pitiful to them both to think of Richard Herford suddenly struck down in his full vigour; but Diana's grief and pity were nothing to Leah's.

"What I want to ask," resumed Leah, "is to be only his nurse, Leah Dart, just as if I'd never called myself anythin' else. I know you and Captain Lynn, and the rest, have a right to settle what I ought to do, because I was your father's wife; but folks will forget all that by-and-by. It was a silly blunder o' mine, and I'm rightly punished for it. I'm young and strong, and I might take care o' Master Dick as long as he lives. Oh, my dear Miss Di, he'll need somebody very true and patient to take care of him. The doctors

say by-and-by, may-be not for some years yet, but the mischief 'ill creep up to his head, and he'll be quite silly, like a poor idiot. He'll need somebody to love him very faithful, then; and there's nobody in the world but me. Other folks might be cruel to him; and it breaks my heart already to think he might be badly dealt by. Perhaps it's the work God has set for me; I'd like to think it was, it 'd be so kind of Him. If I could only fancy God was sayin', 'Leah, you take care of this poor Master Dick for Me,' I could keep on for hundreds o' years. That 'ud give me all the help I want."

"Leah," said Diana, taking her large red hand between her own, "I believe God has set you this work to do. It will be a great sacrifice for you, my poor girl; but I believe you can do it. Yes; you shall take care of him if you will.”

Leah went back to Rillage Grange with a lightened heart. She knew very well that a dreary life lay before her; and that the service she had entered upon would be a hard one. Not for her would there be any of the common joys and sorrows of her own class; no small, quiet home of her own; neither husband nor child. She had forfeited all these; and in their place was allotted to her a life of constant care and weariness; sleepless nights and anxious days. Yet she felt glad, she hardly knew why. Her path by the cliffs led her past the almost hidden cove where she had faced death, while choosing to remain faithful to Richard Herford.

With slow and cautious steps she felt her way to the summit of the precipice, and lying down, stretched her head over the edge to catch a glimpse of the strip of sand far

"You'll let me be Master Dick's servant!" below her. The waves were running in upon exclaimed Leah.

"With all my heart; it's a noble thing to do," "answered Diana. "Did you never hear what Jesus said, 'Whosoever is chief among you, let him be your servant; even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many?' You are choosing wisely now, Leah."

"I don't know much about Him," she said, with kindling eyes, "but it's somethin' like what Uncle Fosse says. Do you mean that Jesus Christ was like a servant, a real servant, doin' real work that was beneath Him? Not makin' believe to work like grand folks do. I never thought of that before. I wish I had, before I began to wish to be a lady. I'll think about that when I grow tired and low. And I'll keep myself under to Mrs. Herford, however aggravatin' she is. If I could only be a right good woman at last, I'd put up with anythin'. Jesus Christ doin' real work that was beneath Him! Oh, Miss Di, what a foolish woman I have been!"

it, curling and rippling in the sunshine, as if playing with one another; but none the less steadily creeping over it, and stealthily filling up all means of escape from it. If she had forsaken her charge, and left Richard Herford there in his unconsciousness, death would have been certain. Thank God! she had kept true.

But as Leah went on her way, slowly and thoughtfully, it seemed to her that the doom stealthily creeping onwards upon Richard Herford was like the treacherous tide she had been gazing on from the perilous standpoint. Slowly it might come, but there was no escape from it. No love or pity could save him. It would be her lot to watch its inroads and encroachments; to sit by, and see him sinking into helpless imbecility. For the hours she had waited under the cliffs for deliverance, there would be years to wait for the only deliverance that could come to release Richard Herford. Could she remain all those years beside him?

"God keep me true!" cried Leah in her inmost heart.

OUR LIFE.

BY REV. CANON BELL, M.A.

"For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time
and then vanisheth away."-JAS. iv. 14.

OUR life is but a light and fleeting vapour

That melts before the broadening of the day; 'Tis like the shadows up the hill-side creepingA dream that quickly vanisheth away.

But shall this thought be cause to us of sorrow,
Or fill our heart with a regretful grief?
Shall it cast darkness on the coming morrow,
To know this human life is all so brief?

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What! shall we grow all mad and wild and reckless, A vapour! Yes; but 'tis not therefore worthless. Ready to utter this despairing cry,

Vapour condensed is changed into the steam

"Come, take thine ease, soul; eat, drink, and be merry, Which sends the vessel o'er the trackless ocean, For on the morrow we are sure to die"?

No! never! Such a thought will rather urge us
To work with both hands earnestly for God;

We will be up and doing in His service,

If we so soon must lie beneath the sod.

A vapour? Yes; but let us all remember
The vapour gives its beauty to the air;

It drapes the skies in crimson, blue, and amber,
And shapes itself in fleecy cloudlets, bright and

fair.

And drives with speed the sounding iron team.

If life be briet, we will be more in earnest,
And work for God with all our soul and might;
Running with girded loins the race before us,

Fighting with all our strength the noble fight.

So, when to heaven is drawn the earthly vapour,
And we are called to stand before the throne,
The Master's smile shall form our happy guerdon,
And we shall hear Him say, "Well done! well
done!"

OUR

THE ENGLISH BIBLE:

Ets Story of Struggle and Triumph.

BY L. N. R., AUTHOR OF "THE BOOK AND ITS STORY."
IV.—THE TIMES OF JOHN WICKLIFFE.

UR great king Alfred died in 901 A.D., to reclaim the ancient liberties of the people. and between him and John Wickliffe, | A ruined altar still exists on the site of the the first translator of the Bible into English, ruins of St. Edmund's Abbey, in Suffolk, there intervened nearly five hundred years. where the barons swore to make King John Wickliffe died in 1384, and had only com- observe the Charter of England's liberties. pleted his work about 1383. It is Anderson On his refusal forty-four barons in their coats who remarks that, "It is impossible to have of mail, on their noble war-horses, sura full idea of the phalanx of talent, policy, rounded by their knights and servants, and and power that were arrayed against the in- about two thousand soldiers, occupied Lontroduction of the Bible into the kingdom of don, and in 1215 obtained the famous England in our native tongue, therefore," Magna-Charta at Runnymede. The Pope says he, "no reader has ever had put before declared it null and void, and ascribed the him the irresistible energy of the Divine word conduct of the barons to Satan himself. But which overcame them all." an accident shortly afterwards caused the death of King John through drunkenness and fright; and none were found to sorrow for so vile a prince. "From his reign," says D'Aubigné, " England may date her enthusiasm for liberty and her dread of Popery."

The judges, priests, and rulers of the land were raging at it. The thought of a Bible in English filled them with alarm and indignation. They said, Is the gospel pearl to be cast abroad and trodden under foot of swine? The jewel of the Church will be turned into the common sport of the people. At the Council of Toulouse, in 1229, a canon had been passed to forbid the laity even to possess any of the books of the Old or New Testament, except, perhaps, the psalter; and the translation even of that was strictly forbidden.

Meanwhile, though Heathenism and the Papacy still fought side by side for the maintenance of the dark ages in Europe, such annals as those of "Iona" show that the students of God's word were many in privileged and quiet centres, and that those who could read it, taught it; also that persecution and captivity only scattered the light the more widely.

When Louis the Feeble-so named in contrast to his warlike brother Charlemagne the Great-sent Anschar, a mission-student from Westphalia, to Jutland and to Sweden, he found in those countries many slaves, whom the sea-kings had brought home from their wars with the Germans, Gauls, and Britons, and who had carried into the families they served, the seeds of Christ's gospel; and Anschar witnessed that these seeds had already sprung, so as to cause Biorn, the King of Sweden, to send to King Louis for a missionary.

But in the face of all this, and far more, Wickliffe began his loving task, and with his eyes open to the prejudices of a world, when about twenty-four years of age he had found salvation for himself in the Holy Scriptures, and he resolved to make the way known to others. Being a learned man, master of Baliol College, Oxford, and also made chaplain to King Edward III., he availed himself of his academic position to expound his views. He said, "The word of the Lord was as a fire in his bones, and he could not refrain." The state of things around him called forth all his energies. After the gleam of light made by King Alfred's reign, it seems that thick darkness In the interval elapsing between the Norsettled down over Britain. Many Anglo- man Conquest and King Edward III., the Saxon kings ended their days in monasteries, Anglo-Saxon language had gradually fallen the celibacy of priests was established by a out of use, while the English was rising into Bull from the Pope at the end of the tenth it. The Anglo-Saxon versions of the Gospels century, convents were multiplied, and the reposed unsought in libraries, and numbers tax of Peter's Pence extorted by the Pontiff, of copies of separate portions had perished, till the craven King John, in 1213, laid his either from use or in a season of panic, or crown at the legate's feet, and surrendered his had been injured by their places of concealkingdom to the Pope as his lord paramount.ment, and many more were burned. NeverIt would have been wonderful indeed if theless, in looking back upon our English this had not called forth a national protest, origin, whether Celtic or Saxon, or both, VII. N.S.

39

modified by Danish and Norman, it is our peculiar characteristic that we bear signs of being the people of a book which we believe Divine; and even when that Book was little spread amongst us as to individual possession, and when power over us as a nation was usurped by a Church whose principle it was to hide the Book from the common people, there was still a thirst for it and a receptiveness of what it taught, and a kind of reverence ready for it, not found among the Greek and Latin races. No human Book had been forced upon us in its stead, as in India, or Persia, or Arabia, and we had, as Saxons, been long in association with a kindred Gothic race, for whom it was translated much earlier than for us-in the fourth century, by Ulphilas, whose Christian parents were from Cappadocia, in near neighbourhood to Galatia, in both which districts the Apostle Paul himself had founded Churches. This family were kidnapped by their countrymen, the heathen Goths, and carried to their settlements on the Danube. Besides his Gothic mother-tongue, Ulphilas was instructed in Greek and Latin. He became a presbyter or bishop, which in those early times meant the same thing, and escaped from a bloody persecution to the foot of the Hoemus Mountains, where he remained until his death. He translated the whole Bible, except the Books of Kings, which he thought it prudent to omit, as he said "his countrymen were too fond of fighting already, and needed, in that matter, the bit rather than the spur."

Ulphilas was born 318 A.D., and died 388. He led a holy life, and laboured for years to convert his people from the worship of Thor and Woden, into which most of them had fallen, in Scandinavia; and they said of him, "Whatever Ulphilas does is well done."

His Gothic translation was the parent language of a free Bible—of many free Bibles, -during the long tyranny of Papal Rome, and it was the great preparation for the after influence of Columba from Iona on the Northern nations. "Nothing like that influence has now been known for more than a thousand years," says the Duke of Argyll; "and Christianity is still spreading, mainly by the emigration of the nations who were converted then." But to return to Wickliffe.

There often arose, here and there, a man who was a "reformer before the Reformation," and who was determined to bring to light Holy Scripture, so long kept in the dark, and to restore its lost authority. Such especially was John Wickliffe. He first became famous for his disputes with the

mendicant friars, and was called "the Gospel Doctor," and his followers "Gospellers." The friars had been called into existence by the Pope, to ferret out and crush and scatter the little bands of Bible readers who had secretly become separatists from the Roman Church.

Imagine, then, the England of that day, with Scotland and Ireland also, covered with monasteries, and swarming with friars. Dressed in robes of black, white, and grey, with a wallet at their back, they begged with piteous air from high and low, but at the same time had great houses of their own, and costly clothes, jewels, and treasures. They would kidnap children from their parents and shut them up in monasteries.

Wickliffe at one time being ill, four of them and four aldermen came to his sick-chamber, asking if he would recant his opinions. He bade his servants raise him in his bed, and exclaimed, "I shall not die, but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the friars." He saw that they trampled the Bible under foot, and he resolved that the people of England should have the Bible and compare it with the voice of the friars. "For why," said he, "should not every man's guide be in every man's hand?”

But there were mighty struggles to be made with the Rome that, pagan or papal, had ruled for thirteen hundred years in our islands, before the English people gained their freedom to read the Word of God. Wickliffe had many enemies. They called him "the organ of the devil, the mirror of hypocrisy ;" and after his death they even "ransacked his grave for his body and bones," which they burned, and cast away the ashes. But that was because his doctrines had spread so fast that it was said, "You could not meet two people on the road but one of them was a disciple of John Wickliffe."

Amid all the difficulties of writing at that day the copies made were so many that it was said of them, "Every cow has its calf." Portions were everywhere eagerly bought and read. The dread laws passed in the fifteenth century against heretics were able, indeed, to suppress open profession of Lollard doctrines; but still men read in secret, and in trials for heresy we hear of humble mechanics, who met at dead of night to hear the Word of God from tattered fragments of Wickliffe's Gospels.

This great reformer did not himself die a martyr, but many of his followers did. John Bradby, one of Wickliffe's disciples, in 1410 was carried to Smithfield, and there in a cask burnt to ashes. Already lamed by the fire,

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