imperfections and sins, veiling an unsuspected, deep-reaching faith. The
day of persecution has ever been a day of revelation in this respect--a
day when the seemingly perfect have been scattered like chaff before the
wind, while the once thoughtless and careless have stood stubborn before
the blast.

Protestantism of the Calvinistic or Puritan type shows little
consciousness of the distinction we are insisting upon. It is disposed
to draw a hard-and-fast line between the "converted" and the reprobate.
Those who are not religious-minded, or who do not take a serious turn,
are scarcely recognized as "saved" although they may not be convicted of
any very flagrant or definite breach of the divine law. Their morality
or their "good works" go for little if they do not experience that sense
of goodness, or of being saved, which is called faith. Much stress is
laid on "feeling good" and little value allowed to what we might call an
unsympathetic and grudging keeping of God's law--however much more it
may cost, from the very fact that it is in some way unsympathetic, and
against the grain. The service of fear and reverence, which Catholicism
regards as the basis and back-bone of love, is held to be abject and
unworthy--almost sinful.

Hence it befalls that no place is found in the Protestant heaven for the
great majority of ordinary people who do not feel a bit good or
religious, who rather dislike going to church and keeping the
commandments, and yet who keep them all the same, because they believe
in God and fear His judgments and honour His law, and even love Him in
the solid, undemonstrative way in which a naughty and troublesome child
loves its parents.

That such a character as Madge Riversdale's should cover a small, firm