FORS CLAVIGERA.

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXV.I told you in last Fors to learn the 15th chapter of Genesis by heart. Too probably, you have done nothing of the sort; but, at any rate, let us now read it together, that I may tell you, of each verse, what I wanted, (and still beg,) you to learn it for.1. “The word of God came to Abram.” Of course you can’t imagine such a thing as that the word of God should ever come toyou? Is that because you are worse, or better, than Abram?—because you are a more, or less, civilized person than he? I leave you to answer that question for yourself;—only, as I have told you often before, but cannot repeat too often, find out first what the Wordis; and don’t suppose that the printed thing in your hand, which you call a Bible, is the Word of God, and that the said Word may therefore always be bought at a pious stationer’s for eighteen-pence.Farther, in the “Explanatory and Critical Commentary and Revision of the Translation” (of the[142]Holy Bible) by Bishops and other Clergy of the Established Church, published in 1871, by Mr. John Murray, you will find the interesting statement, respecting this verse, that “This is the first time that the expression—so frequent afterwards—‘the Word of the Lord’ occurs in the Bible.” The expressioniscertainly rather frequent afterwards; and one might have perhaps expected from the Episcopal and clerical commentators, on this, its first occurrence, some slight notice of the probable meaning of it. They proceed, however, without farther observation, to discuss certain problems, suggested to them by the account of Abram’s vision, respecting somnambulism; on which, though one would have thought few persons more qualified than themselves to give an account of that condition, they arrive at no particular conclusion.But even their so carefully limited statement is only one-third true. It is true of the Hebrew Law; not of the New Testament:—of the entire Bible, it is true of the English version only; not of the Latin, nor the Greek. Nay, it is very importantly and notablyuntrue of those earlier versions.There are three words in Latin, expressive of utterance in three very different manners; namely, ‘verbum,’ a word, ‘vox,’ a voice, and ‘sermo,’ a sermon.Now, in the Latin Bible, when St. John says “the Word was in the beginning,” he says, the ‘Verbum’ was in the beginning. But here, when somebody[143](nobody knows who, and that is a bye question of some importance,) is represented as saying, “The word of the Lord came to Abram,” what somebody really says, is that “There was made to Abram a ‘Sermon’ of the Lord.”Does it not seem possible that one of the almost unconscious reasons of your clergy for not pointing out this difference in expression, may be a doubt whether you ought not rather to desire to hear God preach, than them?But the Latin word ‘verbum,’ from which you get ‘verbal’ and ‘verbosity,’ is a very obscure and imperfect rendering of the great Greek word ‘Logos,’ from which you get ‘logic,’ and ‘theology,’ and all the other logies.And the phrase “word of the Lord,” which the Bishops, with unusual episcopic clairvoyance, have really observed to ‘occur frequently afterwards’ in the English Bible, is, in the Greek Bible always “the Logos of the Lord.” But this Sermon to Abraham is only ‘rhema,’ an actual or mereword; in his interpretation of which, I see, my good Dean of Christ Church quotes the Greek original of Sancho’s proverb, “Fair words butter no parsneps.” Which we shall presently see to have been precisely Abram’s—(of course cautiously expressed)—feeling, on this occasion. But to understand his feeling, we must look what this sermon of the Lord’s was.[144]The sermon (as reported), was kind, and clear. “Fear not, Abram, I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward,” (‘reward’ being the poetical English of our translators—the real phrase being ‘thy exceeding great pay, or gain’). Meaning, “You needn’t make an iron tent, with a revolving gun in the middle of it, for I am your tent and artillery in one; and you needn’t care to get a quantity of property, forIam your property; and you needn’t be stiff about your rights of property, because nobody will dispute your right toMe.”To which Abram answers, “Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless.”Meaning,—“Yes, I know that;—but what is the good ofYouto me, if I haven’t a child? I am a poor mortal: I don’t care about the Heavens or You; I want a child.”Meaning this, at least, if the Latin and English Bibles are right in their translation—“Iam thy great gain.” But the Greek Bible differs from them; and puts the promise in a much more tempting form to the modern English mind. It does not represent God as offering Himself; but something far better than Himself, actually exchangeable property! Wealth, according to Mr. John Stuart Mill. Here is indeed a prospect for Abram!—and something to refuse, worth thinking twice about. For the Septuagint reads, “Fear not, Abram. I am thy Protector, andthou shalt[145]have an exceeding great pay.” Practically, just as if, supposing Sir Stafford Northcote to represent the English nation of the glorious future, a Sermon of the Lord should come just now to him, saying, “Fear not, Sir Stafford, I am thy Devastation; and thou shalt have an exceeding great surplus.”On which supposition, Abram’s answer is less rude, but more astonishing. “Oh God, what wilt thou give me? What good is money to me, who am childless?”Again, as if Sir Stafford Northcote should answer, in the name of the British people, saying, “Lord God, what wilt thou give me? What is the good to me of a surplus? What can I make of surplus? It is children that I want, not surplus!”A truly notable parliamentary utterance on the Budget, if it might be! Not for a little while yet, thinks Sir Stafford; perhaps, think wiser and more sorrowful people than he, not until England has had to stone, according to the law of Deuteronomy xxi. 18, some of the children she has got: or at least to grapeshot them. I couldn’t get anything like comfortable rooms in the Pea Hen at St. Alban’s, the day before yesterday, because the Pea Hen was cherishing, for chickens under her wings, ever so many officers of the Royal Artillery; and some beautiful sixteen-pounders,—exquisite fulfilments of all that science could devise, in those machines; which were unlimbered in the market-place, on their way to Sheffield—where I[146]am going myself, as it happens. I wonder much, in the name of my mistress, whose finger is certainly in this pie, what business we have there, (both of us,) the black machines, and I. As Atropos would have it, too, I had only been making out, with good Mr. Douglas’s help, in Woolwich Repository on Wednesday last, a German Pea Hen’s inscription on a sixteen-pounder of the fourteenth century:—Ich binfürwahr, ein Grober BaurVer frist mein ayr, es wurd ihm Saur.Verse 5th. “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Tell now the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be.”Of courseyouwould have answered God instantly, and told Him the exact number of the stars, and all their magnitudes. Simple Abram, conceiving that, even if he did count all he could see, there might yet be a few more out of sight, does not try.Verse 6th. “And he believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness.”That, on the whole, is the primary verse of the entire Bible. If that is true, the rest is worth whatever Heaven is worth; if that is untrue, the rest is worth nothing. You had better, therefore, if you can, learn it also in Greek and Latin.“Καὶ ἐπίστευσεν Ἀβραμ τῷ Θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.[147]“Credidit Abram Deo, et reputatum est illo in justitiam.”If, then, that text be true, it will follow that you also, if you would have righteousness counted to you, must believe God. And you can’t believe Him if He never says anything to you. Whereupon it will be desirable again to consider if He everhassaid anything to you; and if not, why not.After this verse, I don’t understand much of the chapter myself—but I never expect to understand everything in the Bible, or even more than a little; and will make what I can of it.Verses 7th, 8th. “And He said, I the Lord brought thee, to give thee this land, to inherit it.“But he said, Lord, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?”Now, I don’t see how he could know it better than by being told so; nor how he knew it any better, after seeing a lamp moving between half-carcases. But we will at least learn, as well as we can, what happened; and think it over.The star-lesson was of course given in the night; and, in the morning, Abram slays the five creatures, and watches their bodies all day.‘Such an absurd thing to do—to cut rams and cows in two, to please God!’Indeed it seems so; yet perhaps is better than cutting men in two to please ourselves; and we spend[148]thirty millions a year in preparations for doing that. How many more swiftly divided carcases of horses and men, think you, my Christian friends, have the fowls fed on,notdriven away,—finding them already carved for their feast, or blown into small and convenient morsels, by the military gentlemen of Europe, in sacrifice to—their own epaulettes, (poor gilded and eyeless idols!) during the past seventy and six years of thisoneout of the forty centuries since Abram?“The birds divided he not.” A turtle dove, or in Greek ‘cooing dove;’ and a pigeon, or in Greek ‘dark dove;’ or black dove, such as came to Dodona;—these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why, indeed, any of this butchery and wringing of necks? Not wholly, perhaps, for Abram’s amusement, or God’s; like our coursing and pigeon-shooting;—but then, all the more earnestly one asks, why?The Episcopal commentary tells you, (usefully this time) that thebeastswere divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?We are not sure, by the way, how far the cleaving might reach, without absolute division. Read Leviticus i., 15 to 17, and v., 6 to 10. ‘You have nothing to do with those matters,’ you think? I don’t say you have; but in my schools you must know your Bible, and the meaning of it, or want of meaning, at[149]least a little more definitely than you do now, before I let you throw the book away for ever. So have patience with it a little while; for indeed until you know something of this Bible, I can’t go on to teach you any Koran, much less any Dante or Shakspeare. Have patience, therefore,—and you will need, probably, more than you think; for I am sadly afraid that you don’t at present know so much as the difference between a burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,—do you? (Lev. v. 15); so how can you possibly know anything about Abram’s doves, or afterwards about Ion’s,—not to speak of the Madonna’s? The whole story of the Ionic migration, and the carving of those Ionic capitals, which our architects don’t know how to draw to this day, is complicated with the tradition of the saving of Ion’s life by his recognition of a very small ‘trespass’—a servant’s momentary ‘blasphemy.’ Hearing it, he poured the wine he was about to drink out upon the ground. A dove, flying down from the temple cornice, dipped her beak in it, and died, for the wine had been poisoned by—his mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field,[150]still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. Derangement of the sensori-motor processes, having certain relations of nextness, and behaviour uniformly depending on that nextness, condescendingly explains Professor Clifford.Well, my scientific friends, if ever God does you the grace to give you experience of the sensations, either of horror, or darkness, even to the extent your books and you inflict them on my own tired soul, you will come out on the other side of that shadow with newer views on many subjects than have occurred yet to you,—novelty-hunters though you be.“Behold, thy seed shall be strangers, in a land not theirs.” Again, the importunate question returns, ‘When was this written?’ But the really practical value of the passage for ourselves, is the definite statement, alike by the Greeks and Hebrews, of dream, as one of the states in which knowledge of the future may be distinctly given. The truth of this statement we must again determine for ourselves. Our dreams are partly in our power, by management of daily thought and food; partly, involuntary and accidental—very apt to run in contrary lines from those naturally to be expected of them; and[151]partly, (at least, so say all the Hebrew prophets, and all great Greek, Latin, and English thinkers,) prophetic. Whether what Moses, Homer, David, Daniel, the Evangelists and St. Paul, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Bacon, think on this matter, or what the last-whelped little curly-tailed puppy of the Newington University thinks, is most likely to be true—judge as you will.“In the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”What was the iniquity of the Amorites, think you, and what kind of people were they? Anything like ourselves? or wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed,—terrifically stalking above the vineyard stakes of Eshcol? If like us, in any wise, is it possible that we also may be committing iniquity, capable of less and more fulness, through such a space as four hundred years? Questions worth pausing at; and we will at least try to be a little clear-headed as to Amorite personality.We habitually speak of the Holy Land as the Land of ‘Canaan.’ The ‘promised’ land was indeed that of Canaan, with others. But Israel never got it. They got only the Mount of the Amorites; for the promise was only to be perfected on condition of their perfect obedience. Therefore, I asked you to learn Genesis x. 15, and Genesis x. 16, separately. Forallthe Canaanites were left, to prove Israel, (Judges iii. 3,) and a good many of the Amorites and Jebusites too, (Judges iii. 5–7,) but in the main Israel subdued the last two races, and held the[152]hill country from Lebanon to Hebron, and the capital, Jerusalem, for their own. And if instead of ‘Amorites,’ you will read generally ‘Highlanders,’ (which the word means,) and think of them, for a beginning of notion, simply as Campbells and Macgregors of the East, getting themselves into relations with the pious Israelites closely resembling those of the Highland race and mind of Scotland with its evangelical and economical Lowlanders, you will read these parts of your Bible in at least an incipiently intelligent manner. And above all, you will, or may, understand that the Amorites had a great deal of good in them: that they and the Jebusites were on the whole a generous and courteous people,—so that, when Abram dwells with the Amorite princes, Mamre and Eshcol, they are faithful allies to him; and when he buys his grave from Ephron the Hittite, and David the threshing floor fromAraunahthe Jebusite, both of the mountaineers behave just as the proudest and truest Highland chief would. ‘What is that between me and thee?’ “All these things didAraunah, as a King, give unto the King—andAraunahsaid unto the King, The Lord thy God accept thee.” NotourGod, you see;—but giving sadly, as the Sidonian widow begging,—with claim of no part in Israel.‘Mere oriental formulæ,’ says the Cockney modern expositor—‘offers made in fore-knowledge that they would not be accepted.’No, curly-tailed bow-wow; it is only you and other[153]such automatic poodles who are ‘formulæ.’ Automatic, by the way, you are not; we all know how to wind you up to run with a whirr, like toy-mice.Well, now read consecutively, but quietly, Numbers xiii. 22–29, xxi. 13–26, Deuteronomy iii. 8–13, and Joshua x. 6–14, and you will get a notion or two, which with those already obtained you may best arrange as follows.Put the Philistines, and giants, or bulls, of Bashan, out of the way at present; they are merely elements of physical malignant force, sent against Samson, Saul, and David, as a half-human shape of lion or bear,—carrying off the ark of God in their mouths, and not knowing in the least what to do with it. You already know Tyre as the trading power, Ethiopia as the ignorant—Egypt as the wise—slave; then the Amorites, among the children of Ham, correspond to the great mountain and pastoral powers of the Shemites; and are far the noblest and purest of the race: abiding in their own fastnesses, desiring no conquest, but as Sihon, admitting no invader;—holding their crags so that nothing can be taken out of the hand of the Amorite but with the sword and bow, (Gen. xlviii. 22;) yet living chiefly by pasture and agriculture; worshipping, in their early dynasties, the one eternal God; and, in the person of their great high priest, Melchizedec, but a few years before this vision, blessing the father of the faithful, and feeding him with the everlasting sacraments of earth,—bread and wine,—in[154]the level valley of the Kings, under Salem, the city of peace.Truly, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.’I have given you enough to think of, for this time; but you can’t work it out rightly without a clearly intelligible map of Palestine, and raised models of the districts of Hebron and Jerusalem, which I will provide as soon as possible, according to St. George’s notions of what such things should be, for the Sheffield museum: to the end that at least, in that district of the Yorkshire Amorites, singularly like the Holy Land in its level summits and cleft defiles, it may be understood what England also had once to bring forth of blessing in her own vales of peace; and how her gathering iniquity may bring upon her,—(and at this instant, as I write, early on Good Friday, the malignant hail of spring time, slaying blossom and leaf, smites rattling on the ground that should be soft with flowers,) such day of ruin as the great hail darkened in the going down to Beth-horon, and the sun, that had bronzed their corn and flushed their grape, prolonged on Ajalon, implacable.“And it came to pass, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp which passed between those pieces.”What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive[155]friends. That was precisely what the visiondidforetell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm,1saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision?Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we[156]pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger thepromisedland was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever askingwhatmountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren,[157]Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.Three magnified spirals.I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The[158]three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.2Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’3but had even[159]a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore[160]afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause[161]was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course[162]of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity uponher, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. Farther, I have now put into Mr. Ward’s hands a photograph from a practice-sketch of my own at Oxford, in pure lead pencil, on grey paper secured with ink on the outlines, and touched with white on the lights. It is of a stuffed Kingfisher,—(one can’t see a live one in England nowadays,) and done at full speed of hand; aid it is to be copied for a balance practice to the slow spiral lines.[163]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—[164]£s.d.March.F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)141Miss M. Guest220April.James Burdon (tithe of wages)2100Wm. B. Graham (gift)100Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)1100£861II. Affairs of the Master.£s.d.March16.Balance147181121.Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold905028.R. Forsyth (tea-shop)5400April7.Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock315008.Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)2533195664March21.Jackson£500022.Self41000023.Warren and Jones5616325,andApril7. Crawley4000April1.Secretary25001.Downs25002.Kate, (and 11th April)45006.Burgess50006.David5300444163Balance, April 16.£1511101III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—[165]“16th March, 1876.“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.We remain, yours truly.”My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (andHeis quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying[166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. Theonething needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people[167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and[168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.I can’t tell you more till next letter.IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils andcharges:—“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.“Laxey,April 14, 1876.“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”[170]Handwritten note: May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace[171]1Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.↑2I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.↑3Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one,Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.↑4For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXV.I told you in last Fors to learn the 15th chapter of Genesis by heart. Too probably, you have done nothing of the sort; but, at any rate, let us now read it together, that I may tell you, of each verse, what I wanted, (and still beg,) you to learn it for.1. “The word of God came to Abram.” Of course you can’t imagine such a thing as that the word of God should ever come toyou? Is that because you are worse, or better, than Abram?—because you are a more, or less, civilized person than he? I leave you to answer that question for yourself;—only, as I have told you often before, but cannot repeat too often, find out first what the Wordis; and don’t suppose that the printed thing in your hand, which you call a Bible, is the Word of God, and that the said Word may therefore always be bought at a pious stationer’s for eighteen-pence.Farther, in the “Explanatory and Critical Commentary and Revision of the Translation” (of the[142]Holy Bible) by Bishops and other Clergy of the Established Church, published in 1871, by Mr. John Murray, you will find the interesting statement, respecting this verse, that “This is the first time that the expression—so frequent afterwards—‘the Word of the Lord’ occurs in the Bible.” The expressioniscertainly rather frequent afterwards; and one might have perhaps expected from the Episcopal and clerical commentators, on this, its first occurrence, some slight notice of the probable meaning of it. They proceed, however, without farther observation, to discuss certain problems, suggested to them by the account of Abram’s vision, respecting somnambulism; on which, though one would have thought few persons more qualified than themselves to give an account of that condition, they arrive at no particular conclusion.But even their so carefully limited statement is only one-third true. It is true of the Hebrew Law; not of the New Testament:—of the entire Bible, it is true of the English version only; not of the Latin, nor the Greek. Nay, it is very importantly and notablyuntrue of those earlier versions.There are three words in Latin, expressive of utterance in three very different manners; namely, ‘verbum,’ a word, ‘vox,’ a voice, and ‘sermo,’ a sermon.Now, in the Latin Bible, when St. John says “the Word was in the beginning,” he says, the ‘Verbum’ was in the beginning. But here, when somebody[143](nobody knows who, and that is a bye question of some importance,) is represented as saying, “The word of the Lord came to Abram,” what somebody really says, is that “There was made to Abram a ‘Sermon’ of the Lord.”Does it not seem possible that one of the almost unconscious reasons of your clergy for not pointing out this difference in expression, may be a doubt whether you ought not rather to desire to hear God preach, than them?But the Latin word ‘verbum,’ from which you get ‘verbal’ and ‘verbosity,’ is a very obscure and imperfect rendering of the great Greek word ‘Logos,’ from which you get ‘logic,’ and ‘theology,’ and all the other logies.And the phrase “word of the Lord,” which the Bishops, with unusual episcopic clairvoyance, have really observed to ‘occur frequently afterwards’ in the English Bible, is, in the Greek Bible always “the Logos of the Lord.” But this Sermon to Abraham is only ‘rhema,’ an actual or mereword; in his interpretation of which, I see, my good Dean of Christ Church quotes the Greek original of Sancho’s proverb, “Fair words butter no parsneps.” Which we shall presently see to have been precisely Abram’s—(of course cautiously expressed)—feeling, on this occasion. But to understand his feeling, we must look what this sermon of the Lord’s was.[144]The sermon (as reported), was kind, and clear. “Fear not, Abram, I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward,” (‘reward’ being the poetical English of our translators—the real phrase being ‘thy exceeding great pay, or gain’). Meaning, “You needn’t make an iron tent, with a revolving gun in the middle of it, for I am your tent and artillery in one; and you needn’t care to get a quantity of property, forIam your property; and you needn’t be stiff about your rights of property, because nobody will dispute your right toMe.”To which Abram answers, “Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless.”Meaning,—“Yes, I know that;—but what is the good ofYouto me, if I haven’t a child? I am a poor mortal: I don’t care about the Heavens or You; I want a child.”Meaning this, at least, if the Latin and English Bibles are right in their translation—“Iam thy great gain.” But the Greek Bible differs from them; and puts the promise in a much more tempting form to the modern English mind. It does not represent God as offering Himself; but something far better than Himself, actually exchangeable property! Wealth, according to Mr. John Stuart Mill. Here is indeed a prospect for Abram!—and something to refuse, worth thinking twice about. For the Septuagint reads, “Fear not, Abram. I am thy Protector, andthou shalt[145]have an exceeding great pay.” Practically, just as if, supposing Sir Stafford Northcote to represent the English nation of the glorious future, a Sermon of the Lord should come just now to him, saying, “Fear not, Sir Stafford, I am thy Devastation; and thou shalt have an exceeding great surplus.”On which supposition, Abram’s answer is less rude, but more astonishing. “Oh God, what wilt thou give me? What good is money to me, who am childless?”Again, as if Sir Stafford Northcote should answer, in the name of the British people, saying, “Lord God, what wilt thou give me? What is the good to me of a surplus? What can I make of surplus? It is children that I want, not surplus!”A truly notable parliamentary utterance on the Budget, if it might be! Not for a little while yet, thinks Sir Stafford; perhaps, think wiser and more sorrowful people than he, not until England has had to stone, according to the law of Deuteronomy xxi. 18, some of the children she has got: or at least to grapeshot them. I couldn’t get anything like comfortable rooms in the Pea Hen at St. Alban’s, the day before yesterday, because the Pea Hen was cherishing, for chickens under her wings, ever so many officers of the Royal Artillery; and some beautiful sixteen-pounders,—exquisite fulfilments of all that science could devise, in those machines; which were unlimbered in the market-place, on their way to Sheffield—where I[146]am going myself, as it happens. I wonder much, in the name of my mistress, whose finger is certainly in this pie, what business we have there, (both of us,) the black machines, and I. As Atropos would have it, too, I had only been making out, with good Mr. Douglas’s help, in Woolwich Repository on Wednesday last, a German Pea Hen’s inscription on a sixteen-pounder of the fourteenth century:—Ich binfürwahr, ein Grober BaurVer frist mein ayr, es wurd ihm Saur.Verse 5th. “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Tell now the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be.”Of courseyouwould have answered God instantly, and told Him the exact number of the stars, and all their magnitudes. Simple Abram, conceiving that, even if he did count all he could see, there might yet be a few more out of sight, does not try.Verse 6th. “And he believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness.”That, on the whole, is the primary verse of the entire Bible. If that is true, the rest is worth whatever Heaven is worth; if that is untrue, the rest is worth nothing. You had better, therefore, if you can, learn it also in Greek and Latin.“Καὶ ἐπίστευσεν Ἀβραμ τῷ Θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.[147]“Credidit Abram Deo, et reputatum est illo in justitiam.”If, then, that text be true, it will follow that you also, if you would have righteousness counted to you, must believe God. And you can’t believe Him if He never says anything to you. Whereupon it will be desirable again to consider if He everhassaid anything to you; and if not, why not.After this verse, I don’t understand much of the chapter myself—but I never expect to understand everything in the Bible, or even more than a little; and will make what I can of it.Verses 7th, 8th. “And He said, I the Lord brought thee, to give thee this land, to inherit it.“But he said, Lord, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?”Now, I don’t see how he could know it better than by being told so; nor how he knew it any better, after seeing a lamp moving between half-carcases. But we will at least learn, as well as we can, what happened; and think it over.The star-lesson was of course given in the night; and, in the morning, Abram slays the five creatures, and watches their bodies all day.‘Such an absurd thing to do—to cut rams and cows in two, to please God!’Indeed it seems so; yet perhaps is better than cutting men in two to please ourselves; and we spend[148]thirty millions a year in preparations for doing that. How many more swiftly divided carcases of horses and men, think you, my Christian friends, have the fowls fed on,notdriven away,—finding them already carved for their feast, or blown into small and convenient morsels, by the military gentlemen of Europe, in sacrifice to—their own epaulettes, (poor gilded and eyeless idols!) during the past seventy and six years of thisoneout of the forty centuries since Abram?“The birds divided he not.” A turtle dove, or in Greek ‘cooing dove;’ and a pigeon, or in Greek ‘dark dove;’ or black dove, such as came to Dodona;—these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why, indeed, any of this butchery and wringing of necks? Not wholly, perhaps, for Abram’s amusement, or God’s; like our coursing and pigeon-shooting;—but then, all the more earnestly one asks, why?The Episcopal commentary tells you, (usefully this time) that thebeastswere divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?We are not sure, by the way, how far the cleaving might reach, without absolute division. Read Leviticus i., 15 to 17, and v., 6 to 10. ‘You have nothing to do with those matters,’ you think? I don’t say you have; but in my schools you must know your Bible, and the meaning of it, or want of meaning, at[149]least a little more definitely than you do now, before I let you throw the book away for ever. So have patience with it a little while; for indeed until you know something of this Bible, I can’t go on to teach you any Koran, much less any Dante or Shakspeare. Have patience, therefore,—and you will need, probably, more than you think; for I am sadly afraid that you don’t at present know so much as the difference between a burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,—do you? (Lev. v. 15); so how can you possibly know anything about Abram’s doves, or afterwards about Ion’s,—not to speak of the Madonna’s? The whole story of the Ionic migration, and the carving of those Ionic capitals, which our architects don’t know how to draw to this day, is complicated with the tradition of the saving of Ion’s life by his recognition of a very small ‘trespass’—a servant’s momentary ‘blasphemy.’ Hearing it, he poured the wine he was about to drink out upon the ground. A dove, flying down from the temple cornice, dipped her beak in it, and died, for the wine had been poisoned by—his mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field,[150]still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. Derangement of the sensori-motor processes, having certain relations of nextness, and behaviour uniformly depending on that nextness, condescendingly explains Professor Clifford.Well, my scientific friends, if ever God does you the grace to give you experience of the sensations, either of horror, or darkness, even to the extent your books and you inflict them on my own tired soul, you will come out on the other side of that shadow with newer views on many subjects than have occurred yet to you,—novelty-hunters though you be.“Behold, thy seed shall be strangers, in a land not theirs.” Again, the importunate question returns, ‘When was this written?’ But the really practical value of the passage for ourselves, is the definite statement, alike by the Greeks and Hebrews, of dream, as one of the states in which knowledge of the future may be distinctly given. The truth of this statement we must again determine for ourselves. Our dreams are partly in our power, by management of daily thought and food; partly, involuntary and accidental—very apt to run in contrary lines from those naturally to be expected of them; and[151]partly, (at least, so say all the Hebrew prophets, and all great Greek, Latin, and English thinkers,) prophetic. Whether what Moses, Homer, David, Daniel, the Evangelists and St. Paul, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Bacon, think on this matter, or what the last-whelped little curly-tailed puppy of the Newington University thinks, is most likely to be true—judge as you will.“In the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”What was the iniquity of the Amorites, think you, and what kind of people were they? Anything like ourselves? or wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed,—terrifically stalking above the vineyard stakes of Eshcol? If like us, in any wise, is it possible that we also may be committing iniquity, capable of less and more fulness, through such a space as four hundred years? Questions worth pausing at; and we will at least try to be a little clear-headed as to Amorite personality.We habitually speak of the Holy Land as the Land of ‘Canaan.’ The ‘promised’ land was indeed that of Canaan, with others. But Israel never got it. They got only the Mount of the Amorites; for the promise was only to be perfected on condition of their perfect obedience. Therefore, I asked you to learn Genesis x. 15, and Genesis x. 16, separately. Forallthe Canaanites were left, to prove Israel, (Judges iii. 3,) and a good many of the Amorites and Jebusites too, (Judges iii. 5–7,) but in the main Israel subdued the last two races, and held the[152]hill country from Lebanon to Hebron, and the capital, Jerusalem, for their own. And if instead of ‘Amorites,’ you will read generally ‘Highlanders,’ (which the word means,) and think of them, for a beginning of notion, simply as Campbells and Macgregors of the East, getting themselves into relations with the pious Israelites closely resembling those of the Highland race and mind of Scotland with its evangelical and economical Lowlanders, you will read these parts of your Bible in at least an incipiently intelligent manner. And above all, you will, or may, understand that the Amorites had a great deal of good in them: that they and the Jebusites were on the whole a generous and courteous people,—so that, when Abram dwells with the Amorite princes, Mamre and Eshcol, they are faithful allies to him; and when he buys his grave from Ephron the Hittite, and David the threshing floor fromAraunahthe Jebusite, both of the mountaineers behave just as the proudest and truest Highland chief would. ‘What is that between me and thee?’ “All these things didAraunah, as a King, give unto the King—andAraunahsaid unto the King, The Lord thy God accept thee.” NotourGod, you see;—but giving sadly, as the Sidonian widow begging,—with claim of no part in Israel.‘Mere oriental formulæ,’ says the Cockney modern expositor—‘offers made in fore-knowledge that they would not be accepted.’No, curly-tailed bow-wow; it is only you and other[153]such automatic poodles who are ‘formulæ.’ Automatic, by the way, you are not; we all know how to wind you up to run with a whirr, like toy-mice.Well, now read consecutively, but quietly, Numbers xiii. 22–29, xxi. 13–26, Deuteronomy iii. 8–13, and Joshua x. 6–14, and you will get a notion or two, which with those already obtained you may best arrange as follows.Put the Philistines, and giants, or bulls, of Bashan, out of the way at present; they are merely elements of physical malignant force, sent against Samson, Saul, and David, as a half-human shape of lion or bear,—carrying off the ark of God in their mouths, and not knowing in the least what to do with it. You already know Tyre as the trading power, Ethiopia as the ignorant—Egypt as the wise—slave; then the Amorites, among the children of Ham, correspond to the great mountain and pastoral powers of the Shemites; and are far the noblest and purest of the race: abiding in their own fastnesses, desiring no conquest, but as Sihon, admitting no invader;—holding their crags so that nothing can be taken out of the hand of the Amorite but with the sword and bow, (Gen. xlviii. 22;) yet living chiefly by pasture and agriculture; worshipping, in their early dynasties, the one eternal God; and, in the person of their great high priest, Melchizedec, but a few years before this vision, blessing the father of the faithful, and feeding him with the everlasting sacraments of earth,—bread and wine,—in[154]the level valley of the Kings, under Salem, the city of peace.Truly, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.’I have given you enough to think of, for this time; but you can’t work it out rightly without a clearly intelligible map of Palestine, and raised models of the districts of Hebron and Jerusalem, which I will provide as soon as possible, according to St. George’s notions of what such things should be, for the Sheffield museum: to the end that at least, in that district of the Yorkshire Amorites, singularly like the Holy Land in its level summits and cleft defiles, it may be understood what England also had once to bring forth of blessing in her own vales of peace; and how her gathering iniquity may bring upon her,—(and at this instant, as I write, early on Good Friday, the malignant hail of spring time, slaying blossom and leaf, smites rattling on the ground that should be soft with flowers,) such day of ruin as the great hail darkened in the going down to Beth-horon, and the sun, that had bronzed their corn and flushed their grape, prolonged on Ajalon, implacable.“And it came to pass, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp which passed between those pieces.”What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive[155]friends. That was precisely what the visiondidforetell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm,1saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision?Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we[156]pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger thepromisedland was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever askingwhatmountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren,[157]Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.Three magnified spirals.I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The[158]three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.2Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’3but had even[159]a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore[160]afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause[161]was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course[162]of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity uponher, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. Farther, I have now put into Mr. Ward’s hands a photograph from a practice-sketch of my own at Oxford, in pure lead pencil, on grey paper secured with ink on the outlines, and touched with white on the lights. It is of a stuffed Kingfisher,—(one can’t see a live one in England nowadays,) and done at full speed of hand; aid it is to be copied for a balance practice to the slow spiral lines.[163]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—[164]£s.d.March.F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)141Miss M. Guest220April.James Burdon (tithe of wages)2100Wm. B. Graham (gift)100Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)1100£861II. Affairs of the Master.£s.d.March16.Balance147181121.Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold905028.R. Forsyth (tea-shop)5400April7.Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock315008.Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)2533195664March21.Jackson£500022.Self41000023.Warren and Jones5616325,andApril7. Crawley4000April1.Secretary25001.Downs25002.Kate, (and 11th April)45006.Burgess50006.David5300444163Balance, April 16.£1511101III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—[165]“16th March, 1876.“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.We remain, yours truly.”My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (andHeis quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying[166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. Theonething needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people[167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and[168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.I can’t tell you more till next letter.IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils andcharges:—“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.“Laxey,April 14, 1876.“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”[170]Handwritten note: May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace[171]1Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.↑2I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.↑3Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one,Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.↑4For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXV.

I told you in last Fors to learn the 15th chapter of Genesis by heart. Too probably, you have done nothing of the sort; but, at any rate, let us now read it together, that I may tell you, of each verse, what I wanted, (and still beg,) you to learn it for.1. “The word of God came to Abram.” Of course you can’t imagine such a thing as that the word of God should ever come toyou? Is that because you are worse, or better, than Abram?—because you are a more, or less, civilized person than he? I leave you to answer that question for yourself;—only, as I have told you often before, but cannot repeat too often, find out first what the Wordis; and don’t suppose that the printed thing in your hand, which you call a Bible, is the Word of God, and that the said Word may therefore always be bought at a pious stationer’s for eighteen-pence.Farther, in the “Explanatory and Critical Commentary and Revision of the Translation” (of the[142]Holy Bible) by Bishops and other Clergy of the Established Church, published in 1871, by Mr. John Murray, you will find the interesting statement, respecting this verse, that “This is the first time that the expression—so frequent afterwards—‘the Word of the Lord’ occurs in the Bible.” The expressioniscertainly rather frequent afterwards; and one might have perhaps expected from the Episcopal and clerical commentators, on this, its first occurrence, some slight notice of the probable meaning of it. They proceed, however, without farther observation, to discuss certain problems, suggested to them by the account of Abram’s vision, respecting somnambulism; on which, though one would have thought few persons more qualified than themselves to give an account of that condition, they arrive at no particular conclusion.But even their so carefully limited statement is only one-third true. It is true of the Hebrew Law; not of the New Testament:—of the entire Bible, it is true of the English version only; not of the Latin, nor the Greek. Nay, it is very importantly and notablyuntrue of those earlier versions.There are three words in Latin, expressive of utterance in three very different manners; namely, ‘verbum,’ a word, ‘vox,’ a voice, and ‘sermo,’ a sermon.Now, in the Latin Bible, when St. John says “the Word was in the beginning,” he says, the ‘Verbum’ was in the beginning. But here, when somebody[143](nobody knows who, and that is a bye question of some importance,) is represented as saying, “The word of the Lord came to Abram,” what somebody really says, is that “There was made to Abram a ‘Sermon’ of the Lord.”Does it not seem possible that one of the almost unconscious reasons of your clergy for not pointing out this difference in expression, may be a doubt whether you ought not rather to desire to hear God preach, than them?But the Latin word ‘verbum,’ from which you get ‘verbal’ and ‘verbosity,’ is a very obscure and imperfect rendering of the great Greek word ‘Logos,’ from which you get ‘logic,’ and ‘theology,’ and all the other logies.And the phrase “word of the Lord,” which the Bishops, with unusual episcopic clairvoyance, have really observed to ‘occur frequently afterwards’ in the English Bible, is, in the Greek Bible always “the Logos of the Lord.” But this Sermon to Abraham is only ‘rhema,’ an actual or mereword; in his interpretation of which, I see, my good Dean of Christ Church quotes the Greek original of Sancho’s proverb, “Fair words butter no parsneps.” Which we shall presently see to have been precisely Abram’s—(of course cautiously expressed)—feeling, on this occasion. But to understand his feeling, we must look what this sermon of the Lord’s was.[144]The sermon (as reported), was kind, and clear. “Fear not, Abram, I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward,” (‘reward’ being the poetical English of our translators—the real phrase being ‘thy exceeding great pay, or gain’). Meaning, “You needn’t make an iron tent, with a revolving gun in the middle of it, for I am your tent and artillery in one; and you needn’t care to get a quantity of property, forIam your property; and you needn’t be stiff about your rights of property, because nobody will dispute your right toMe.”To which Abram answers, “Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless.”Meaning,—“Yes, I know that;—but what is the good ofYouto me, if I haven’t a child? I am a poor mortal: I don’t care about the Heavens or You; I want a child.”Meaning this, at least, if the Latin and English Bibles are right in their translation—“Iam thy great gain.” But the Greek Bible differs from them; and puts the promise in a much more tempting form to the modern English mind. It does not represent God as offering Himself; but something far better than Himself, actually exchangeable property! Wealth, according to Mr. John Stuart Mill. Here is indeed a prospect for Abram!—and something to refuse, worth thinking twice about. For the Septuagint reads, “Fear not, Abram. I am thy Protector, andthou shalt[145]have an exceeding great pay.” Practically, just as if, supposing Sir Stafford Northcote to represent the English nation of the glorious future, a Sermon of the Lord should come just now to him, saying, “Fear not, Sir Stafford, I am thy Devastation; and thou shalt have an exceeding great surplus.”On which supposition, Abram’s answer is less rude, but more astonishing. “Oh God, what wilt thou give me? What good is money to me, who am childless?”Again, as if Sir Stafford Northcote should answer, in the name of the British people, saying, “Lord God, what wilt thou give me? What is the good to me of a surplus? What can I make of surplus? It is children that I want, not surplus!”A truly notable parliamentary utterance on the Budget, if it might be! Not for a little while yet, thinks Sir Stafford; perhaps, think wiser and more sorrowful people than he, not until England has had to stone, according to the law of Deuteronomy xxi. 18, some of the children she has got: or at least to grapeshot them. I couldn’t get anything like comfortable rooms in the Pea Hen at St. Alban’s, the day before yesterday, because the Pea Hen was cherishing, for chickens under her wings, ever so many officers of the Royal Artillery; and some beautiful sixteen-pounders,—exquisite fulfilments of all that science could devise, in those machines; which were unlimbered in the market-place, on their way to Sheffield—where I[146]am going myself, as it happens. I wonder much, in the name of my mistress, whose finger is certainly in this pie, what business we have there, (both of us,) the black machines, and I. As Atropos would have it, too, I had only been making out, with good Mr. Douglas’s help, in Woolwich Repository on Wednesday last, a German Pea Hen’s inscription on a sixteen-pounder of the fourteenth century:—Ich binfürwahr, ein Grober BaurVer frist mein ayr, es wurd ihm Saur.Verse 5th. “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Tell now the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be.”Of courseyouwould have answered God instantly, and told Him the exact number of the stars, and all their magnitudes. Simple Abram, conceiving that, even if he did count all he could see, there might yet be a few more out of sight, does not try.Verse 6th. “And he believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness.”That, on the whole, is the primary verse of the entire Bible. If that is true, the rest is worth whatever Heaven is worth; if that is untrue, the rest is worth nothing. You had better, therefore, if you can, learn it also in Greek and Latin.“Καὶ ἐπίστευσεν Ἀβραμ τῷ Θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.[147]“Credidit Abram Deo, et reputatum est illo in justitiam.”If, then, that text be true, it will follow that you also, if you would have righteousness counted to you, must believe God. And you can’t believe Him if He never says anything to you. Whereupon it will be desirable again to consider if He everhassaid anything to you; and if not, why not.After this verse, I don’t understand much of the chapter myself—but I never expect to understand everything in the Bible, or even more than a little; and will make what I can of it.Verses 7th, 8th. “And He said, I the Lord brought thee, to give thee this land, to inherit it.“But he said, Lord, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?”Now, I don’t see how he could know it better than by being told so; nor how he knew it any better, after seeing a lamp moving between half-carcases. But we will at least learn, as well as we can, what happened; and think it over.The star-lesson was of course given in the night; and, in the morning, Abram slays the five creatures, and watches their bodies all day.‘Such an absurd thing to do—to cut rams and cows in two, to please God!’Indeed it seems so; yet perhaps is better than cutting men in two to please ourselves; and we spend[148]thirty millions a year in preparations for doing that. How many more swiftly divided carcases of horses and men, think you, my Christian friends, have the fowls fed on,notdriven away,—finding them already carved for their feast, or blown into small and convenient morsels, by the military gentlemen of Europe, in sacrifice to—their own epaulettes, (poor gilded and eyeless idols!) during the past seventy and six years of thisoneout of the forty centuries since Abram?“The birds divided he not.” A turtle dove, or in Greek ‘cooing dove;’ and a pigeon, or in Greek ‘dark dove;’ or black dove, such as came to Dodona;—these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why, indeed, any of this butchery and wringing of necks? Not wholly, perhaps, for Abram’s amusement, or God’s; like our coursing and pigeon-shooting;—but then, all the more earnestly one asks, why?The Episcopal commentary tells you, (usefully this time) that thebeastswere divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?We are not sure, by the way, how far the cleaving might reach, without absolute division. Read Leviticus i., 15 to 17, and v., 6 to 10. ‘You have nothing to do with those matters,’ you think? I don’t say you have; but in my schools you must know your Bible, and the meaning of it, or want of meaning, at[149]least a little more definitely than you do now, before I let you throw the book away for ever. So have patience with it a little while; for indeed until you know something of this Bible, I can’t go on to teach you any Koran, much less any Dante or Shakspeare. Have patience, therefore,—and you will need, probably, more than you think; for I am sadly afraid that you don’t at present know so much as the difference between a burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,—do you? (Lev. v. 15); so how can you possibly know anything about Abram’s doves, or afterwards about Ion’s,—not to speak of the Madonna’s? The whole story of the Ionic migration, and the carving of those Ionic capitals, which our architects don’t know how to draw to this day, is complicated with the tradition of the saving of Ion’s life by his recognition of a very small ‘trespass’—a servant’s momentary ‘blasphemy.’ Hearing it, he poured the wine he was about to drink out upon the ground. A dove, flying down from the temple cornice, dipped her beak in it, and died, for the wine had been poisoned by—his mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field,[150]still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. Derangement of the sensori-motor processes, having certain relations of nextness, and behaviour uniformly depending on that nextness, condescendingly explains Professor Clifford.Well, my scientific friends, if ever God does you the grace to give you experience of the sensations, either of horror, or darkness, even to the extent your books and you inflict them on my own tired soul, you will come out on the other side of that shadow with newer views on many subjects than have occurred yet to you,—novelty-hunters though you be.“Behold, thy seed shall be strangers, in a land not theirs.” Again, the importunate question returns, ‘When was this written?’ But the really practical value of the passage for ourselves, is the definite statement, alike by the Greeks and Hebrews, of dream, as one of the states in which knowledge of the future may be distinctly given. The truth of this statement we must again determine for ourselves. Our dreams are partly in our power, by management of daily thought and food; partly, involuntary and accidental—very apt to run in contrary lines from those naturally to be expected of them; and[151]partly, (at least, so say all the Hebrew prophets, and all great Greek, Latin, and English thinkers,) prophetic. Whether what Moses, Homer, David, Daniel, the Evangelists and St. Paul, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Bacon, think on this matter, or what the last-whelped little curly-tailed puppy of the Newington University thinks, is most likely to be true—judge as you will.“In the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”What was the iniquity of the Amorites, think you, and what kind of people were they? Anything like ourselves? or wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed,—terrifically stalking above the vineyard stakes of Eshcol? If like us, in any wise, is it possible that we also may be committing iniquity, capable of less and more fulness, through such a space as four hundred years? Questions worth pausing at; and we will at least try to be a little clear-headed as to Amorite personality.We habitually speak of the Holy Land as the Land of ‘Canaan.’ The ‘promised’ land was indeed that of Canaan, with others. But Israel never got it. They got only the Mount of the Amorites; for the promise was only to be perfected on condition of their perfect obedience. Therefore, I asked you to learn Genesis x. 15, and Genesis x. 16, separately. Forallthe Canaanites were left, to prove Israel, (Judges iii. 3,) and a good many of the Amorites and Jebusites too, (Judges iii. 5–7,) but in the main Israel subdued the last two races, and held the[152]hill country from Lebanon to Hebron, and the capital, Jerusalem, for their own. And if instead of ‘Amorites,’ you will read generally ‘Highlanders,’ (which the word means,) and think of them, for a beginning of notion, simply as Campbells and Macgregors of the East, getting themselves into relations with the pious Israelites closely resembling those of the Highland race and mind of Scotland with its evangelical and economical Lowlanders, you will read these parts of your Bible in at least an incipiently intelligent manner. And above all, you will, or may, understand that the Amorites had a great deal of good in them: that they and the Jebusites were on the whole a generous and courteous people,—so that, when Abram dwells with the Amorite princes, Mamre and Eshcol, they are faithful allies to him; and when he buys his grave from Ephron the Hittite, and David the threshing floor fromAraunahthe Jebusite, both of the mountaineers behave just as the proudest and truest Highland chief would. ‘What is that between me and thee?’ “All these things didAraunah, as a King, give unto the King—andAraunahsaid unto the King, The Lord thy God accept thee.” NotourGod, you see;—but giving sadly, as the Sidonian widow begging,—with claim of no part in Israel.‘Mere oriental formulæ,’ says the Cockney modern expositor—‘offers made in fore-knowledge that they would not be accepted.’No, curly-tailed bow-wow; it is only you and other[153]such automatic poodles who are ‘formulæ.’ Automatic, by the way, you are not; we all know how to wind you up to run with a whirr, like toy-mice.Well, now read consecutively, but quietly, Numbers xiii. 22–29, xxi. 13–26, Deuteronomy iii. 8–13, and Joshua x. 6–14, and you will get a notion or two, which with those already obtained you may best arrange as follows.Put the Philistines, and giants, or bulls, of Bashan, out of the way at present; they are merely elements of physical malignant force, sent against Samson, Saul, and David, as a half-human shape of lion or bear,—carrying off the ark of God in their mouths, and not knowing in the least what to do with it. You already know Tyre as the trading power, Ethiopia as the ignorant—Egypt as the wise—slave; then the Amorites, among the children of Ham, correspond to the great mountain and pastoral powers of the Shemites; and are far the noblest and purest of the race: abiding in their own fastnesses, desiring no conquest, but as Sihon, admitting no invader;—holding their crags so that nothing can be taken out of the hand of the Amorite but with the sword and bow, (Gen. xlviii. 22;) yet living chiefly by pasture and agriculture; worshipping, in their early dynasties, the one eternal God; and, in the person of their great high priest, Melchizedec, but a few years before this vision, blessing the father of the faithful, and feeding him with the everlasting sacraments of earth,—bread and wine,—in[154]the level valley of the Kings, under Salem, the city of peace.Truly, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.’I have given you enough to think of, for this time; but you can’t work it out rightly without a clearly intelligible map of Palestine, and raised models of the districts of Hebron and Jerusalem, which I will provide as soon as possible, according to St. George’s notions of what such things should be, for the Sheffield museum: to the end that at least, in that district of the Yorkshire Amorites, singularly like the Holy Land in its level summits and cleft defiles, it may be understood what England also had once to bring forth of blessing in her own vales of peace; and how her gathering iniquity may bring upon her,—(and at this instant, as I write, early on Good Friday, the malignant hail of spring time, slaying blossom and leaf, smites rattling on the ground that should be soft with flowers,) such day of ruin as the great hail darkened in the going down to Beth-horon, and the sun, that had bronzed their corn and flushed their grape, prolonged on Ajalon, implacable.“And it came to pass, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp which passed between those pieces.”What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive[155]friends. That was precisely what the visiondidforetell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm,1saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision?Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we[156]pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger thepromisedland was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever askingwhatmountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren,[157]Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.Three magnified spirals.I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The[158]three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.2Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’3but had even[159]a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore[160]afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause[161]was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course[162]of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity uponher, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. Farther, I have now put into Mr. Ward’s hands a photograph from a practice-sketch of my own at Oxford, in pure lead pencil, on grey paper secured with ink on the outlines, and touched with white on the lights. It is of a stuffed Kingfisher,—(one can’t see a live one in England nowadays,) and done at full speed of hand; aid it is to be copied for a balance practice to the slow spiral lines.[163]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—[164]£s.d.March.F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)141Miss M. Guest220April.James Burdon (tithe of wages)2100Wm. B. Graham (gift)100Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)1100£861II. Affairs of the Master.£s.d.March16.Balance147181121.Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold905028.R. Forsyth (tea-shop)5400April7.Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock315008.Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)2533195664March21.Jackson£500022.Self41000023.Warren and Jones5616325,andApril7. Crawley4000April1.Secretary25001.Downs25002.Kate, (and 11th April)45006.Burgess50006.David5300444163Balance, April 16.£1511101III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—[165]“16th March, 1876.“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.We remain, yours truly.”My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (andHeis quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying[166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. Theonething needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people[167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and[168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.I can’t tell you more till next letter.IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils andcharges:—“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.“Laxey,April 14, 1876.“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”[170]Handwritten note: May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace[171]

I told you in last Fors to learn the 15th chapter of Genesis by heart. Too probably, you have done nothing of the sort; but, at any rate, let us now read it together, that I may tell you, of each verse, what I wanted, (and still beg,) you to learn it for.

1. “The word of God came to Abram.” Of course you can’t imagine such a thing as that the word of God should ever come toyou? Is that because you are worse, or better, than Abram?—because you are a more, or less, civilized person than he? I leave you to answer that question for yourself;—only, as I have told you often before, but cannot repeat too often, find out first what the Wordis; and don’t suppose that the printed thing in your hand, which you call a Bible, is the Word of God, and that the said Word may therefore always be bought at a pious stationer’s for eighteen-pence.

Farther, in the “Explanatory and Critical Commentary and Revision of the Translation” (of the[142]Holy Bible) by Bishops and other Clergy of the Established Church, published in 1871, by Mr. John Murray, you will find the interesting statement, respecting this verse, that “This is the first time that the expression—so frequent afterwards—‘the Word of the Lord’ occurs in the Bible.” The expressioniscertainly rather frequent afterwards; and one might have perhaps expected from the Episcopal and clerical commentators, on this, its first occurrence, some slight notice of the probable meaning of it. They proceed, however, without farther observation, to discuss certain problems, suggested to them by the account of Abram’s vision, respecting somnambulism; on which, though one would have thought few persons more qualified than themselves to give an account of that condition, they arrive at no particular conclusion.

But even their so carefully limited statement is only one-third true. It is true of the Hebrew Law; not of the New Testament:—of the entire Bible, it is true of the English version only; not of the Latin, nor the Greek. Nay, it is very importantly and notablyuntrue of those earlier versions.

There are three words in Latin, expressive of utterance in three very different manners; namely, ‘verbum,’ a word, ‘vox,’ a voice, and ‘sermo,’ a sermon.

Now, in the Latin Bible, when St. John says “the Word was in the beginning,” he says, the ‘Verbum’ was in the beginning. But here, when somebody[143](nobody knows who, and that is a bye question of some importance,) is represented as saying, “The word of the Lord came to Abram,” what somebody really says, is that “There was made to Abram a ‘Sermon’ of the Lord.”

Does it not seem possible that one of the almost unconscious reasons of your clergy for not pointing out this difference in expression, may be a doubt whether you ought not rather to desire to hear God preach, than them?

But the Latin word ‘verbum,’ from which you get ‘verbal’ and ‘verbosity,’ is a very obscure and imperfect rendering of the great Greek word ‘Logos,’ from which you get ‘logic,’ and ‘theology,’ and all the other logies.

And the phrase “word of the Lord,” which the Bishops, with unusual episcopic clairvoyance, have really observed to ‘occur frequently afterwards’ in the English Bible, is, in the Greek Bible always “the Logos of the Lord.” But this Sermon to Abraham is only ‘rhema,’ an actual or mereword; in his interpretation of which, I see, my good Dean of Christ Church quotes the Greek original of Sancho’s proverb, “Fair words butter no parsneps.” Which we shall presently see to have been precisely Abram’s—(of course cautiously expressed)—feeling, on this occasion. But to understand his feeling, we must look what this sermon of the Lord’s was.[144]

The sermon (as reported), was kind, and clear. “Fear not, Abram, I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward,” (‘reward’ being the poetical English of our translators—the real phrase being ‘thy exceeding great pay, or gain’). Meaning, “You needn’t make an iron tent, with a revolving gun in the middle of it, for I am your tent and artillery in one; and you needn’t care to get a quantity of property, forIam your property; and you needn’t be stiff about your rights of property, because nobody will dispute your right toMe.”

To which Abram answers, “Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless.”

Meaning,—“Yes, I know that;—but what is the good ofYouto me, if I haven’t a child? I am a poor mortal: I don’t care about the Heavens or You; I want a child.”

Meaning this, at least, if the Latin and English Bibles are right in their translation—“Iam thy great gain.” But the Greek Bible differs from them; and puts the promise in a much more tempting form to the modern English mind. It does not represent God as offering Himself; but something far better than Himself, actually exchangeable property! Wealth, according to Mr. John Stuart Mill. Here is indeed a prospect for Abram!—and something to refuse, worth thinking twice about. For the Septuagint reads, “Fear not, Abram. I am thy Protector, andthou shalt[145]have an exceeding great pay.” Practically, just as if, supposing Sir Stafford Northcote to represent the English nation of the glorious future, a Sermon of the Lord should come just now to him, saying, “Fear not, Sir Stafford, I am thy Devastation; and thou shalt have an exceeding great surplus.”

On which supposition, Abram’s answer is less rude, but more astonishing. “Oh God, what wilt thou give me? What good is money to me, who am childless?”

Again, as if Sir Stafford Northcote should answer, in the name of the British people, saying, “Lord God, what wilt thou give me? What is the good to me of a surplus? What can I make of surplus? It is children that I want, not surplus!”

A truly notable parliamentary utterance on the Budget, if it might be! Not for a little while yet, thinks Sir Stafford; perhaps, think wiser and more sorrowful people than he, not until England has had to stone, according to the law of Deuteronomy xxi. 18, some of the children she has got: or at least to grapeshot them. I couldn’t get anything like comfortable rooms in the Pea Hen at St. Alban’s, the day before yesterday, because the Pea Hen was cherishing, for chickens under her wings, ever so many officers of the Royal Artillery; and some beautiful sixteen-pounders,—exquisite fulfilments of all that science could devise, in those machines; which were unlimbered in the market-place, on their way to Sheffield—where I[146]am going myself, as it happens. I wonder much, in the name of my mistress, whose finger is certainly in this pie, what business we have there, (both of us,) the black machines, and I. As Atropos would have it, too, I had only been making out, with good Mr. Douglas’s help, in Woolwich Repository on Wednesday last, a German Pea Hen’s inscription on a sixteen-pounder of the fourteenth century:—

Ich binfürwahr, ein Grober BaurVer frist mein ayr, es wurd ihm Saur.

Ich binfürwahr, ein Grober Baur

Ver frist mein ayr, es wurd ihm Saur.

Verse 5th. “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Tell now the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be.”

Of courseyouwould have answered God instantly, and told Him the exact number of the stars, and all their magnitudes. Simple Abram, conceiving that, even if he did count all he could see, there might yet be a few more out of sight, does not try.

Verse 6th. “And he believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness.”

That, on the whole, is the primary verse of the entire Bible. If that is true, the rest is worth whatever Heaven is worth; if that is untrue, the rest is worth nothing. You had better, therefore, if you can, learn it also in Greek and Latin.

“Καὶ ἐπίστευσεν Ἀβραμ τῷ Θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.[147]

“Credidit Abram Deo, et reputatum est illo in justitiam.”

If, then, that text be true, it will follow that you also, if you would have righteousness counted to you, must believe God. And you can’t believe Him if He never says anything to you. Whereupon it will be desirable again to consider if He everhassaid anything to you; and if not, why not.

After this verse, I don’t understand much of the chapter myself—but I never expect to understand everything in the Bible, or even more than a little; and will make what I can of it.

Verses 7th, 8th. “And He said, I the Lord brought thee, to give thee this land, to inherit it.

“But he said, Lord, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?”

Now, I don’t see how he could know it better than by being told so; nor how he knew it any better, after seeing a lamp moving between half-carcases. But we will at least learn, as well as we can, what happened; and think it over.

The star-lesson was of course given in the night; and, in the morning, Abram slays the five creatures, and watches their bodies all day.

‘Such an absurd thing to do—to cut rams and cows in two, to please God!’

Indeed it seems so; yet perhaps is better than cutting men in two to please ourselves; and we spend[148]thirty millions a year in preparations for doing that. How many more swiftly divided carcases of horses and men, think you, my Christian friends, have the fowls fed on,notdriven away,—finding them already carved for their feast, or blown into small and convenient morsels, by the military gentlemen of Europe, in sacrifice to—their own epaulettes, (poor gilded and eyeless idols!) during the past seventy and six years of thisoneout of the forty centuries since Abram?

“The birds divided he not.” A turtle dove, or in Greek ‘cooing dove;’ and a pigeon, or in Greek ‘dark dove;’ or black dove, such as came to Dodona;—these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why, indeed, any of this butchery and wringing of necks? Not wholly, perhaps, for Abram’s amusement, or God’s; like our coursing and pigeon-shooting;—but then, all the more earnestly one asks, why?

The Episcopal commentary tells you, (usefully this time) that thebeastswere divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?

We are not sure, by the way, how far the cleaving might reach, without absolute division. Read Leviticus i., 15 to 17, and v., 6 to 10. ‘You have nothing to do with those matters,’ you think? I don’t say you have; but in my schools you must know your Bible, and the meaning of it, or want of meaning, at[149]least a little more definitely than you do now, before I let you throw the book away for ever. So have patience with it a little while; for indeed until you know something of this Bible, I can’t go on to teach you any Koran, much less any Dante or Shakspeare. Have patience, therefore,—and you will need, probably, more than you think; for I am sadly afraid that you don’t at present know so much as the difference between a burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,—do you? (Lev. v. 15); so how can you possibly know anything about Abram’s doves, or afterwards about Ion’s,—not to speak of the Madonna’s? The whole story of the Ionic migration, and the carving of those Ionic capitals, which our architects don’t know how to draw to this day, is complicated with the tradition of the saving of Ion’s life by his recognition of a very small ‘trespass’—a servant’s momentary ‘blasphemy.’ Hearing it, he poured the wine he was about to drink out upon the ground. A dove, flying down from the temple cornice, dipped her beak in it, and died, for the wine had been poisoned by—his mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.

On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field,[150]still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”

Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. Derangement of the sensori-motor processes, having certain relations of nextness, and behaviour uniformly depending on that nextness, condescendingly explains Professor Clifford.

Well, my scientific friends, if ever God does you the grace to give you experience of the sensations, either of horror, or darkness, even to the extent your books and you inflict them on my own tired soul, you will come out on the other side of that shadow with newer views on many subjects than have occurred yet to you,—novelty-hunters though you be.

“Behold, thy seed shall be strangers, in a land not theirs.” Again, the importunate question returns, ‘When was this written?’ But the really practical value of the passage for ourselves, is the definite statement, alike by the Greeks and Hebrews, of dream, as one of the states in which knowledge of the future may be distinctly given. The truth of this statement we must again determine for ourselves. Our dreams are partly in our power, by management of daily thought and food; partly, involuntary and accidental—very apt to run in contrary lines from those naturally to be expected of them; and[151]partly, (at least, so say all the Hebrew prophets, and all great Greek, Latin, and English thinkers,) prophetic. Whether what Moses, Homer, David, Daniel, the Evangelists and St. Paul, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Bacon, think on this matter, or what the last-whelped little curly-tailed puppy of the Newington University thinks, is most likely to be true—judge as you will.

“In the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”

What was the iniquity of the Amorites, think you, and what kind of people were they? Anything like ourselves? or wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed,—terrifically stalking above the vineyard stakes of Eshcol? If like us, in any wise, is it possible that we also may be committing iniquity, capable of less and more fulness, through such a space as four hundred years? Questions worth pausing at; and we will at least try to be a little clear-headed as to Amorite personality.

We habitually speak of the Holy Land as the Land of ‘Canaan.’ The ‘promised’ land was indeed that of Canaan, with others. But Israel never got it. They got only the Mount of the Amorites; for the promise was only to be perfected on condition of their perfect obedience. Therefore, I asked you to learn Genesis x. 15, and Genesis x. 16, separately. Forallthe Canaanites were left, to prove Israel, (Judges iii. 3,) and a good many of the Amorites and Jebusites too, (Judges iii. 5–7,) but in the main Israel subdued the last two races, and held the[152]hill country from Lebanon to Hebron, and the capital, Jerusalem, for their own. And if instead of ‘Amorites,’ you will read generally ‘Highlanders,’ (which the word means,) and think of them, for a beginning of notion, simply as Campbells and Macgregors of the East, getting themselves into relations with the pious Israelites closely resembling those of the Highland race and mind of Scotland with its evangelical and economical Lowlanders, you will read these parts of your Bible in at least an incipiently intelligent manner. And above all, you will, or may, understand that the Amorites had a great deal of good in them: that they and the Jebusites were on the whole a generous and courteous people,—so that, when Abram dwells with the Amorite princes, Mamre and Eshcol, they are faithful allies to him; and when he buys his grave from Ephron the Hittite, and David the threshing floor fromAraunahthe Jebusite, both of the mountaineers behave just as the proudest and truest Highland chief would. ‘What is that between me and thee?’ “All these things didAraunah, as a King, give unto the King—andAraunahsaid unto the King, The Lord thy God accept thee.” NotourGod, you see;—but giving sadly, as the Sidonian widow begging,—with claim of no part in Israel.

‘Mere oriental formulæ,’ says the Cockney modern expositor—‘offers made in fore-knowledge that they would not be accepted.’

No, curly-tailed bow-wow; it is only you and other[153]such automatic poodles who are ‘formulæ.’ Automatic, by the way, you are not; we all know how to wind you up to run with a whirr, like toy-mice.

Well, now read consecutively, but quietly, Numbers xiii. 22–29, xxi. 13–26, Deuteronomy iii. 8–13, and Joshua x. 6–14, and you will get a notion or two, which with those already obtained you may best arrange as follows.

Put the Philistines, and giants, or bulls, of Bashan, out of the way at present; they are merely elements of physical malignant force, sent against Samson, Saul, and David, as a half-human shape of lion or bear,—carrying off the ark of God in their mouths, and not knowing in the least what to do with it. You already know Tyre as the trading power, Ethiopia as the ignorant—Egypt as the wise—slave; then the Amorites, among the children of Ham, correspond to the great mountain and pastoral powers of the Shemites; and are far the noblest and purest of the race: abiding in their own fastnesses, desiring no conquest, but as Sihon, admitting no invader;—holding their crags so that nothing can be taken out of the hand of the Amorite but with the sword and bow, (Gen. xlviii. 22;) yet living chiefly by pasture and agriculture; worshipping, in their early dynasties, the one eternal God; and, in the person of their great high priest, Melchizedec, but a few years before this vision, blessing the father of the faithful, and feeding him with the everlasting sacraments of earth,—bread and wine,—in[154]the level valley of the Kings, under Salem, the city of peace.

Truly, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.’

I have given you enough to think of, for this time; but you can’t work it out rightly without a clearly intelligible map of Palestine, and raised models of the districts of Hebron and Jerusalem, which I will provide as soon as possible, according to St. George’s notions of what such things should be, for the Sheffield museum: to the end that at least, in that district of the Yorkshire Amorites, singularly like the Holy Land in its level summits and cleft defiles, it may be understood what England also had once to bring forth of blessing in her own vales of peace; and how her gathering iniquity may bring upon her,—(and at this instant, as I write, early on Good Friday, the malignant hail of spring time, slaying blossom and leaf, smites rattling on the ground that should be soft with flowers,) such day of ruin as the great hail darkened in the going down to Beth-horon, and the sun, that had bronzed their corn and flushed their grape, prolonged on Ajalon, implacable.

“And it came to pass, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp which passed between those pieces.”

What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive[155]friends. That was precisely what the visiondidforetell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm,1saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision?

Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we[156]pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’

For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.

Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger thepromisedland was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.

And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever askingwhatmountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren,[157]Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.

Three magnified spirals.

I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The[158]three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.

But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.2Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’3but had even[159]a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore[160]afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.

My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.

But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause[161]was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course[162]of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity uponher, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.

I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.

The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. Farther, I have now put into Mr. Ward’s hands a photograph from a practice-sketch of my own at Oxford, in pure lead pencil, on grey paper secured with ink on the outlines, and touched with white on the lights. It is of a stuffed Kingfisher,—(one can’t see a live one in England nowadays,) and done at full speed of hand; aid it is to be copied for a balance practice to the slow spiral lines.[163]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—[164]£s.d.March.F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)141Miss M. Guest220April.James Burdon (tithe of wages)2100Wm. B. Graham (gift)100Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)1100£861II. Affairs of the Master.£s.d.March16.Balance147181121.Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold905028.R. Forsyth (tea-shop)5400April7.Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock315008.Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)2533195664March21.Jackson£500022.Self41000023.Warren and Jones5616325,andApril7. Crawley4000April1.Secretary25001.Downs25002.Kate, (and 11th April)45006.Burgess50006.David5300444163Balance, April 16.£1511101III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—[165]“16th March, 1876.“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.We remain, yours truly.”My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (andHeis quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying[166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. Theonething needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people[167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and[168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.I can’t tell you more till next letter.IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils andcharges:—“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.“Laxey,April 14, 1876.“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”[170]Handwritten note: May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace[171]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. Affairs of the Company.I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—[164]£s.d.March.F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)141Miss M. Guest220April.James Burdon (tithe of wages)2100Wm. B. Graham (gift)100Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)1100£861II. Affairs of the Master.£s.d.March16.Balance147181121.Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold905028.R. Forsyth (tea-shop)5400April7.Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock315008.Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)2533195664March21.Jackson£500022.Self41000023.Warren and Jones5616325,andApril7. Crawley4000April1.Secretary25001.Downs25002.Kate, (and 11th April)45006.Burgess50006.David5300444163Balance, April 16.£1511101III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—[165]“16th March, 1876.“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.We remain, yours truly.”My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (andHeis quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying[166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. Theonething needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people[167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and[168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.I can’t tell you more till next letter.IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils andcharges:—“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.“Laxey,April 14, 1876.“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”[170]Handwritten note: May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace[171]

I. Affairs of the Company.

I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.

I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.

Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—[164]

£s.d.March.F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)141Miss M. Guest220April.James Burdon (tithe of wages)2100Wm. B. Graham (gift)100Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)1100£861

II. Affairs of the Master.

£s.d.March16.Balance147181121.Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold905028.R. Forsyth (tea-shop)5400April7.Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock315008.Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)2533195664March21.Jackson£500022.Self41000023.Warren and Jones5616325,andApril7. Crawley4000April1.Secretary25001.Downs25002.Kate, (and 11th April)45006.Burgess50006.David5300444163Balance, April 16.£1511101

III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—[165]

“16th March, 1876.“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.We remain, yours truly.”

“16th March, 1876.

“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.

We remain, yours truly.”

My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.

Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (andHeis quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying[166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.

Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—

1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. Theonething needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.

2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.

3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people[167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.

4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.

5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.

6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and[168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.

7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.

I can’t tell you more till next letter.

IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils andcharges:—

“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”

“Whatisto be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then,[169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.

“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?

“Much love, dear Godfather,“Ever your loving Godchild.”

V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.

“Laxey,April 14, 1876.“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”

“Laxey,April 14, 1876.

“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s.5d., should be £107 16s.5d.

“Yours, ever truly,“Egbert Rydings.

“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”

[170]

Handwritten note: May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace

[171]

1Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.↑2I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.↑3Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one,Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.↑4For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.↑

1Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.↑2I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.↑3Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one,Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.↑4For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.↑

1Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.↑

1Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17.↑

2I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.↑

2I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8.↑

3Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one,Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.↑

3Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one,Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.↑

4For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.↑

4For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy.↑

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