St. Paul\'s Church, Berganton, was a small, plain structure of brick and stone, rather prettily situated on the bank of the aforesaid creek, which flowed through the midst of the town. Its sole claim to exterior beauty must have rested on the thick vines which covered its walls, framed its windows, and climbed to the roof of its low, square tower; doing their best to atone for its many architectural deficiencies, its failure to present to the eye a certain material "beauty of holiness," in harmony with the spiritual loveliness of the unseen temple, of which it was the faint type.

Toward this church, on the morning after his visit to Oakstead, Bergan directed his steps. Meeting his uncle in the vestibule, he was soon seated in the square family pew, and had a few moments to look about him, before service.

In its small way, the church was almost as much a memorial of the House of Bergan as the old Hall itself. Sir Harry had been a fair sample of the average English Churchman of his day, with whom a certain amount of religious observance was deemed necessary and becoming, both by way of seemly garmenting for one\'s self, and good example for one\'s neighbors. If it did not reach very deep into the heart, it at least imparted a certain completeness and dignity to the outward life.

Moreover, family tradition was strongly in religion\'s favor. There had always been relations of a highly friendly and decorous sort between the house and the church; and to have turned his back disrespectfully upon the one, would have been to show himself a degenerate scion of the other. As a natural consequence, Sir Harry did not feel that he had done his whole duty to himself, or his posterity, until he had provided a fitting stage for the necessary family ceremonials of christening, marriage, and burial; as well as an appropriate spot for his own enjoyment of a respectable Sunday doze, under the soothing influence of an orthodox sermon, after having duly taken his share in the responses of the morning service. If this school of Churchmen had its faults, it also had its virtues. If its standard of religion was a low one, with a strong leaning toward human pride and selfish indulgence; it was better than the open irreverence and infidelity, the unblushing disregard of religious restraints and sanctions, of later generations.

Under Sir Harry\'s auspices, therefore, the foundations of St. Paul\'s were laid, and its walls arose, as a kind of necessary adjunct to Bergan Hall. And his successors, with rare exceptions, had felt it a duty to add to its interior attractions, as well as to make it a continuous family record, by memorial windows of stained glass, mural tablets of bronze or marble, and thank-offerings of font, communion plate, and other appliances and adornments. Some of these, no doubt, were merely self-laudatory, the fitful outgrowth of family pride; others might have sprung from a sense of what was beautiful and fitting,—which was a very good thing, as far as it went, though it went not much below the surface; but a few there were, doubtless, which had been consecrated to their use by heartfelt tears of sorrow, of penitence, or of gratitude. Be this as it may, they all helped (at least, in human eyes) to give the interior of St. Paul\'s a certain completeness, and even a degree of beauty and harmony.

Still, both in its size and its decorations, the church was far inferior to the Hall. There was a vast disproportion, both in amount and quality, between the space and the furniture set apart for the service and pleasure of a single household, and that consecrated to the worship of God, and the spiritual nurture of His people. But, in the matter of preservation, as well as in answering a definite end, the advantage was greatly on the side of the church and its appointments. Wherever the Bergan hands had grown slack, or had been withdrawn, in that work, others had taken it up, for the love of Christ, and carried it forward to completion, or kept it from lapsing back into chaos.

And so, Bergan—remembering how surely the merely secular memorials of Sir Harry and his successors had been overtaken by the slow feet of decay, while these others had been saved by their connection with an institution having a deeper and broader principle of life—was led into a natural enough, though for him a most unusual, train of thought. He asked himself if Sir Harry would not have done better, even for his own selfish end, to have given the larger share (or, at least, an equal one) of his time, care, and money, to the edifice which had the surest hold upon permanency, and was most likely to be sacredly kept for its original purpose. In our country, more than almost anywhere else, people build houses for other people to dwell in, and Time delights to blot family names from his roll, at least on the page where they were first written. All family mansions, however fair and proud, are surely destined to fall into stranger hands, or to be given over to the Vandal occupation of decay. All families, of however lofty position, are certain to sojourn, at times, in the valley of humiliation, if they do not lose themselves in the deeper valley of extinction. Would it not have been better, then, to have foregone somewhat of the frail and faithless magnificence of Bergan Hall, and linked the dear family name and memory more closely with the indestructible institution which belongs to the ages?

And, as he thus questioned, the narrow walls, the low roof, and the insignificant adornments of the little church seemed slowly to widen and lift themselves to the grand proportions of a vast, pillared temple; and the small chancel window—doing so little, nor doing that little well, to keep alive the fair memory of "Elizabeth, wife of Sir Harry"—became a great glory of pictured saints and angels, through whose diaphanous bodies the rainbow-light fell softly among a crowd of kneeling worshippers;—unto whom the sculptured mural tablets, the jewel-tinted glass, the stately walls, the soaring arch, told over and over again the lovely story, and held up to view the noble example, of a race whose labor and delight it had been to build strong and beautiful the walls of Zion; and which, in so doing, had raised up to itself the most enduring, as well as the most precious of earthly monuments. How much better this than the crumbling splendors of Bergan Hall, and the fading glory of an almost extinct name!

"The Lord is in His holy temple," was here breathed through Bergan\'s visioned fane, in appropriately awed and solemn tones. Nevertheless, they broke the slender thread of its being. As Bergan rose to his feet, with the rest of the congregation, its majestic vista, its pict............