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Divinity School. Gift of Miss Hamit W. Hall. March 11.1889

20475.12 (2)

محمد

Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1836, by HILLIARD, GRAY

& Co., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
MAY 16 1957

CAMBRIDGE PRESS:

METCALF, TORRY, AND BALLOU.

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2

TALES.

LIESE; OR, THE PROGRESS OF WORSHIP.

ON a mountain steep, near the sources of the Maine, stood a convent whose vesper bell had echoed from summit to summit for four hundred years. The old men in the dwellings of the valley below delivered to the little ones about their knees, the traditions they had received from their grandfathers respecting the original consecration of the chapel of this convent, and the arrival of the relics which crowned its sanctity. The Reformation having begun, the time was now at hand when the glory of the place must pass away. The magistracy of Nuremberg, having abolished the mass, and broken up all monastic associations in their city, extended their decrees through all the districts around. Unwelcome messengers had appeared at the gates of every convent to announce the day when its inmates must depart, and its possessions be given into the the hand of the civil power. By this summons the quiet of every monastic abode was instantaneously broken up. The superiors, inwardly mourning over the necessity which they must obey, strove in vain to preserve their authority during the few days which yet remained. The spiritual fathers observed no bounds in their revilings of

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the heretic by whose infernal agency the half of the world had been drawn over from Christ to Satan, and the rulers of the earth become empowered to scatter abroad the defenceless sheep who had till now been guarded by shepherds so faithful as themselves. Among the flocks thus mourned over, a tumultuous variety of emotions contended for predominance. Dim remembrances of the distant world in some; vivid recollections in others: in some, a horror of the turmoil of life which must now be encountered; in others, transports mingled with awe in the prospect of restoration to society and in all, eager curiosity respecting the progress of the religious feuds whose effects they were now feeling, and respecting him in whom these feuds originated.

Toward's sunset, one evening in the beginning of March, 1522, Liese, one of the sisterhood of the convent before mentioned, sat by the window of her cell to watch, for the last time, the approach of twilight over those mountains which had been the companions of her meditations for twelve years. Hither had she retired in her twentieth year, not from an impulse of enthusiastic devotion, nor in obedience to a family decree; but, wrung by disappointment, with the hope of finding a sanctuary where new griefs could not reach her, however impossible it might be for any power in earth or heaven to prevent the ghosts of former emotions from haunting her. She had found more than she looked for. Here the floods which overwhelmed her spirit drew off into a natural channel, and a deep and calm flow of devotion sustained her. Here she had long supposed that she should spend the remainder of her days, and had therefore attached herself in a spirit of content to every thing around her, contemplating no further change than was from time to time wrought by the woodman's axe in the woods beneath her eye, or by the chances of mortality

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