chained ever since Christ rose to his throne of ever.

lasting Dominion."

"You must be mistaken, madam," said Mrs. Jay, "for I met him with legions of fallen angels not long since, and left them at work destroying a world of beauty; ripping up continents with horrible combustions."

"Can it be so ?" said Calliste, with a look of terror, in which Faustinus sympathized.

Mrs. Jay was earnestly requested to tell them of all she had seen, for both Faustinus and Calliste said they had supposed Satan had been shut up in hell since the resurrection of the Saviour.*

Mrs. Jay replied: "It is only a short time since I was roaming the wastes of space; a solitude so vast that no ray from far-off stars reached it, when suddenly a baleful glare rose out of the depths. Coming straight on I saw a multitude of mighty forms, and stood awaiting their approach. I was soon surrounded with a legion of angels of darkness, who encompassed me as in a circle of red flame. Then came forward their

*That Satan has been in some way restricted in his power on earth since the roming of Christ, is an opinion very generally received. Milton thus alludes to it, in his sublime poem, "On the morning of Christ's nativity "-Hymn, stanza xviii

"For from this happy day

The old Dragon under ground,

In straiter limits bound,

Not half so far casts his usurped sway,

And wroth to see his kingdom fail

Swindges the scaly horror of his folded tail," etc.

chief to where I stood, gazing with wonder, but without one throb of fear, on this globe of faces whose flaming eyes were all bent upon me with fierce glances of anger. How well he bore himself! I recalled the Milton's description of Satan, and I knew in whose Fresence I stood.*

666 "Who and whence art thou?' he asked in tones which would have once filled me with horror. I replied, 'I am a child of earth, for whom Christ died, and who now stands before you, redeemed from the curse and dominion of sin. Would I could tell you of like mercy and pardon; of a restoration to happiness and heaven.' IIe replied, 'Know, child of God, I could mount up from the pit of hell to the highest throne of created existence, and be once more Lucifer, son of the morning, if I so willed to be?' 'Ah! I replied, 'you could as easily create a world as to will to be what you once were. Would it were possible that your enmity could be changed to love.' Oh, how he swelled with pride and rage as I said this. 'Never! penitence precedes pardon, and I hate God and all his works, and will mar if I cannot destroy, and will forever task omnipotence to renew what I reduce to ruin and chaos.'

"In a twinkling these baleful flaming angels broke their

*"He, their dread commander, above the rest

In shape and gesture proudly eminent,

Stood like a tower: his form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appear'd

Less than archangel ruin'd."-Paradise Lost, book i. lines 590.

circle and I saw them rushing deeper into the night of unfathomable space. The sound of such a moving multitude was like the roar of mighty waters upon the air of midnight. I stood awed, when an angel of light joined me, to whom I told all I had seen. 'Come with me,' said the angel, "and you shall see by what agencies worlds are made." As we flew with the speed of the messengers of the Almighty, the angel told me, that a far-off world had reached a condition when a cataclysm was required. 'It has been,' he said, 'the home of lower forms of life, and is about to assume a higher development. Satan, as the 'architect of ruin,' does but fulfill the behests of Infinite wisdom.'

"A bright star now sent its rays across the wastes of night, for which we steered our course, when a splendid solar system came into view. It was a galaxy of glories and worlds filled with Paradises. We had only time to survey a beautiful world soon to be made desolate, when the corps of destroying angels came and circled the globe. The heavens gathered the blackness of darkness, and suddenly great thunderbolts, hurled by Satanic power,* broke through the crust of the earth and down rushed the ocean, when flames of concealed fires burst forth, and towering mountains were ripped open and melted, like icebergs in a sea of flame. It was a scene of terrible sublimity!"

Perpetua, after a silence which seemed the effect of

* See Job, i. 16, for examples of Satanic power.

terror upon the minds of Mrs. Jay's auditory, with her eyes raised, spoke: "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints!" Then, turning to Faustinus, she asked, "What description of world is this where you have been residing, and what species of intelligences are these new-made creatures of God's goodness ?"

"The system is so very like our own planetary system," replied Faustinus, "that to us it seemed a reduplication of the sun and earth and planets; only the constellations were all different, as you may readily suppose they would be. The new Adam and Eve were just beginning their labors in the Paradise of their own Eden, when we reached them. At that time they were being taught the uses of words and the value and qualities of things about them. There is no death known in that world, for there is no knowledge of sin. After living about a century of our years, they are translated to some higher sphere.

"We were thus permitted," said Calliste, "to live with them the life of our first parents; as they would have lived had Satan and sin never entered Paradise."

"It must have been full of interest to you, thus to minister to the development of the faculties of an unfallen race of human beings," said Mrs. Jay.

"It has been," said Calliste; "and now that you tell us Satan is let loose once more, we must return and help to guard this happy home from his wiles."

"Oh, there can be but one fallen race in all the universe," " said Peter. "Christ has died once for all. The mystery of man's redemption has been revealed, and as our great Redeemer said on the cross, 'It is finished!'"

"And do you think so, Perpetua ?" asked Mrs. Jay. "So far as assurance can be mine, I am confident that our race, and the 'angels who kept not their first estate,' are the only intelligences to whom sin is known by bitter experience. How sin came to be, is the enigma of enigmas, before which we must bow and be silentbelieving and resting in our knowledge of God and his attributes, that 'He will do right." "

66

"Perpetua, you speak of the origin of evil," said Faustinus, as being the enigma of enigmas. When we left on our mission to this new world, which was in the year of Christ 330, just after the Synod of Nice had dissolved, the great stumbling-block in the way of the progress of the church was that of the Holy Trinity.* Pray tell me is that now an established article of faith in the churches of Christ."

"It is of all Christian churches. There are in Germany, Britain and Gaul, churches, so called, which reject

* The Athanasian Creed was left out of the Book of Common Prayer, by our House of Bishops, in adapting the Liturgy of the Church of England to our country: an omission, which, for one, the author has ever regretted. He has always felt deep sympathy with this creed for its intensity of zeal for the divinity of Christ, and the reduplications of its claims for the personality of the Holy Trinity. It was the work of a mighty mind, and will stand up, like a peak of the Cordilleras against a clear sky, unapproachable in its sublimity.