twice, assured himself that she didn't care, and was glad that he had not committed himself. Allison was not a bad sort of a man; he was just a man.

This was the state of affairs when a fire at the Thorp cottage upset White Sulphur Springs and permitted to the stalwart conductor a display of courage which seemed to write "finis" to his romance. The blaze broke out at dead of night and gained such headway in the front of the dwelling that there appeared scant probability that the inmates could be rescued. But the volunteer fire brigade propped its ladders against the veranda before the bedroom windows, but very wisely refused to mount them through the blast furnace of the blazing porch. Arthur Allison went up one of them as nimble as an organ grinder's monkey and carried both Alta and her mother to places of safety.

Miss Barrington, who thought it risky to be among the spectators at a fire, did not witness this deed, but she heard of it through the General and his wife, and her heart swelled with pride. She had known all along that Arthur Allison was capable of just such heroism. Forgetting her previous reserve, she hastened to congratulate him, bringing up speechless and fearful, with tears in her deep, blue eyes, before the couch on which he lay nursing a bandaged burn on his cheek.

This burn, the result of a falling brand while he was carrying Miss Thorp out of danger, kept her hero conductor wrapped in darkness and oil silk for a fortnight. His right eye had been endangered and had to be treated very carefully. Miss Barrington forfeited a considerable amount of her time and remained at the Springs. She really was needed after Miss Thorp, to whom the fire soon became only an impersonal occurrence which made good material for story telling, found a rowboat shared with her earlier admirer rather preferable to a stuffy room shared with her later suitor and the odor of iodofoam. The injured man missed her greatly and inquired of Miss Barrington concerning her. Miss Barrington, with bravery in the feminine gender of that which he

Miss Barrington tried to change the subject.

"She's a brick!" the convalescent went on. "Pretty as a picture, too. Don't you think so, Miss Barrington?"

Miss Barrington did.

She concluded that Miss Thorp was something better than pretty when she witnessed her first meeting with Allison after the bandages had been taken off from his face. The fire brand had penciled a mark of seared scarlet from his forehead to his throat. Miss Thorp gave vent to an abbreviated scream when she saw it, and then, mastering herself, grasped the victim's hand firmly. "I didn't realize," she said, "how much you had done for me."

Manifestly Miss Barrington had been unjust in considering her a mere doll.

One evening soon after, however, when she was sitting at her window looking into the mist of her life, she was given reason to resurrect her first opinion. Allison and Mist Thorp were seated below, and Allison was proposing their early marriage on Christmas day. The woman up above knew that she ought not to listen, but her breath was quivering in her throat and she could not move away to save her life.

"Don't!" Miss Thorp was urging when her voice first became audible.

"Don't, Arthur! Please don't!" "But why?" he persisted. "I love you. Until this moment I was sure that you loved me."

"I did!" cried the girl. "Oh, I did until-You mustn't ever again ask me to marry you!”

The repe

"Why?" repeated Allison. tition was determined. "I think I have earned the right to have a reason given.” "That is the reason!" "What!" The word was spoken sharply, like a military command. Miss Thorp quailed.

"What-what happened when you earned the right? Oh, I know I'm hor

rid! I know I'll be ashamed all the rest

of my life. But your cheek! I couldn't bear to look at that scar."

"Oh," said Allison.

"If it hadn't been for me you wouldn't have been burned," Miss Thorp went on, sobbing almost hysterically. "I realize that. I'm sorry; indeed I'm sorry! Won't you say you forgive me? Please do!"

"Yes," said Allison. "It's not your fault. I've just been a fool, I see it now. I'm going away tomorrow."

"And you won't think too harshly of me?"

Allison rose, and Miss Barrington heard him push back his chair. "I'll try not to think of you at all," he answered. "I'll try to remember a little woman who has never forgotten me. Her love was too fine for me to comprehend at first, but now, somehow, I seem to understand it."

Then two sounds broke the stillness of the night. Arthur Allison had gone into the hotel, slamming the door after him, and Miss Barrington, fainting for the first time in her life, had fallen to the floor.

Arthur heard the noise made by her fall, and not knowing what else to do, hastened to the room of his aunt and then to the room of Miss Barrington. He quickly raised her in his arms while Mrs. Van Alstyne applied restoratives, which soon had the desired effect to re

store consciousness. Allison was still holding her in his arms. She gently disengaged herself, looking with wonder into his eyes. What she saw there caused a rosy blush that actually made her look pretty.

"What caused you to faint, dear?" asked her aunt.

"Oh, I can't tell you; I was so surprised and-but you must forgive me, Mr. Allison. You see, I was sitting in my window and overheard you talking below to Miss Thorp. The sudden shock paralyzed me; I couldn't move to save my soul."

'Were you so very angry, Kathrynwas that it?"

"Oh, no, no! I was not angry at all; on the contrary, it made me very happy to know you were disenchanted of the alluring and fascinating charms of a vain, silly woman."

"Yes, I was very rudely disenchanted, but it took a fire brand causing a bad burn, leaving an ugly scar to do it. The scar will gradually disappear, but my love for you, Kathryn, will endure for all time. We'll have our wedding on Christmas and spend our honeymoon in Parkersburg, where I am to remain as division superintendent.

The General grumbles about losing his secretary and stenographer, and a fairly good conductor, because he, and she, were different, and are happy and proud of it.

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out unto thy houseIsaiah lviii., 6-7.

A working creed is a creed that works. The demand for a practical religion is

not a modern discovery. It would be hard for the most sensational denunciators of mere sentimentalism in religion to use stronger language than did those old prophets of Israel. Religion always has been either practice or pretense. It has its deep tides of feeling, but it never ends in these; the deeper the emotion, the more definite will be its expression. The danger is not that religion shall be

not always the man who is denouncing a doctrinaire church who is doing most for the down-trodden. The preaching of ethics is often a refuge from their practice, and the writing of books and the delivery of lectures on sociology becomes often an excuse from service of one's neighbors.

Most men think that heaven is given us as a warehouse of unrealized ideals; the truth is, earth is given us as a workshop for their actualization. The vital creed is the one that, with its force of conviction and its sway of heaven-born aspiration, compels one to attempt to make real now all the good we hope heaven may hold.

The real services of a church are outside its walls. The inspiration and direction may be given within, but the work must be done without, where the need is greatest. When a man's religion never gets beyond singing and sighing, he is stifling himself with unexpressed emotions. It is not strange that churches die when they are content to discuss definitions of the infinite, while those who are made in His likeness are stunted, dwarfed, and snuffed out by greed and shame.

Some Christians know more about the anatomy of an angel than they do about the pathology of the poor. Yet no living being ever saw an angel, while the poor we have always with us. The noblest divinity is simple humanity. The most glorious religious service is simply doing the things for one another that we believe the all-loving God would do if he were one of us.

Church work may be as far from Christ's work as the east from the west. It is easy to mistake fuss and feathers for faith. The Master never worried over congregations, or choirs, or canonicals. He left those things to the people who oppose him and brought him to death. He simply did the good he could, never counting the cost to himself; he simply spoke the truth he knew, never calculating the consequences. The working creed wastes no energies on definitions while men are doing; it walks in the Teacher's way; it does his work.

The need of religion is not some comprehensive scheme of saving the world by machinery; it is not some automatic social propagandum which will wipe out the slum, clean up crime, and make this world a highly desirable place of residence for respectable people. The preparation of such plans may be left to the unfortunates who lack the heart or the energy to engage in definite work.

Neither does it need alone a mighty wave of indignation against modern pharasaism and hypocrisy, nor fasting over our own faults, nor feeding the hungry with the tears of our sympathy, copiously, generously poured out in the comfort of our reading chairs.

The need is simple; practical religion is the easiest of all. It is to do the good that lies nearest you; neither to lecture on it, nor to weep over it, nor even to pray over it until you have done it. Deeds of love, not dreams of beneficence, are recorded in heaven. It is a nobler thing by far to have put a clean, smooth pillow under a sick man's head than to be the author of the most elaborate Utopia, the defender of the most intricate doctrine, or the most rigid observer of exact ritual.

'Tis the coward who quits to misfortune, 'Tis the knave who changes each day, 'Tis the fool who wins half the battleThen throws all his chances away.

There is little in life but labor,

Tomorrow may find that a dream;

Success is the bride of Endeavor,
And luck-but a meteor's gleam.
The time to succeed is when others,
Discouraged, show traces of tire;
The battle is fought in the home-stretch
And won-'twixt the flag and the wire!
-Moore.

E. E. CLARK, EDITOR.

C. D. KELLOGG, ASSOCIATE.

It was

Again the glad earth is to celebrate the birth of the founder of the Christian religion-a religion of "Peace on earth, and among men good will!" In it the fierce conflict and strife between individuals or nations, has no part, its dominant idea is peace and a continual struggle between right and wrong. the idea and hope, no doubt, of the Jewish people that the coming Messiah would be a mighty man of valor, whose warlike genius would speedily release them of the bondage in which they were held by their ancient enemies. And indeed we cannot wonder at the attitude of the Jews when we think of the diametrically opposite teaching which permeated every act and word of Christ. That a conflict should rage in the everyday doings of life between the forces of right and wrong, did not seem to enter into the thought and actions of those times. Christ discovered and insisted upon individuality of action and responsibility, so that we may be sure His conception of man's relation to man is not so transcendentally divine as it is humanly and wonderfully practical. Down through the ages we see that this idea has been gaining ground, little by little, until in free America it has borne its fullest fruition, and back

from whose shores, it is fair to hope, will flow to the other nations of the earth the example and the sublimity of individuality-of self government.

Into much of the talk and parlance of the day has come the expression the "common people," and it is probable that many people look upon it as a demagogic catch-phrase and fail to trace its origin to a feeling made manifest in many ways as noting a difference between those who are burdened with this world's goods and those who are not a tacit recognition of the estimation in which Christ held those who were abnormally rich. We are all familiar with the many fierce denunciations of the rich with which Christ's teachings are interspersed; nevertheless, we do not believe He intended to inveigh against riches as a concrete fact, but only to make very plain the great danger to the moral, physical and spiritual fiber to which they subjected the possessor. This may not apply to our time any more than to the time when Christ lived, for it is probable that the relative differences between the rich and poor are not proportionally greater now than they were then; nor that more vital differences exist in the abnormal climaxes and intensities of love in our time,