fashion of your country—and will you still persevere in this fanciful and profitless waywardness?”

——

“As he spoke, Isidora looked round her helplessly—every object was a confirmation of his arguments—she shuddered and submitted. But as they walked on in silence, she could not help interrupting it to give utterance to the thousand anxieties that oppressed her heart.

“But you speak,” said she, in a suppressed and pleading tone,—“you speak of religion in words that make me tremble—you speak of it as the fashion of a country,—as a thing of form, of accident, of habit. What faith do you profess?—what church do you frequent?—what holy rites do you perform?”—“I venerate all faiths—alike, I hold all religious rites—pretty much in the same respect,” said Melmoth, while his former wild and scoffing levity seemed to struggle vainly with a feeling of involuntary horror. “And do you then, indeed, believe in holy things?” asked Isidora. “Do you indeed?” she repeated anxiously. “I believe in a God,” answered Melmoth, in a voice that froze her blood; “you have heard of those who believe and tremble,—such is he who speaks to you!”

“Isidora’s acquaintance with the book from which he quoted, was too limited to permit her to understand the allusion. She knew, according to the religious education she had received, more of her breviary than her Bible; and though she pursued her inquiry in a timid and anxious tone, she felt no additional terror from words she did not understand.

“But,” she continued, “Christianity is something more than a belief in a God. Do you also believe in all that the Catholic church declares to be essential to salvation? Do you believe that”—— And here she added a name too sacred, and accompanied with terms too awful, to be expressed in pages so light as these(1). “I believe it all—I know it all,” answered Melmoth, in a voice of stern and reluctant confession. “Infidel and scoffer as I may appear to you, there is no martyr of the Christian church, who in other times blazed for his God, that has borne or exhibited a more resplendent illustration of his faith, than I shall bear one day—and for ever. There is a slight difference only between our testimonies in point of duration. They burned for the truths they loved for a few moments—not so many perchance. Some were suffocated before the flames could reach them,—but I am doomed to bear my attestation to the truth of the gospel, amid fires that shall burn for ever and ever. See with what a glorious destiny yours, my bride, is united! You, as a Christian, would 

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