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 bin furwahr, ein Grober Baur

Ver frist mein ayr, es wurd ihm Saur.2

6. 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 course you would 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 ̓Αβρὰμ τῷ Θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.”

"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

1 [The diary says, "To Woolwich, gave lecture badly: horrid headache. Saw Repository." The lecture, delivered on April 18, was on Minerals. It is not reported, but was probably the same that he had given on April 13 at Christ's Hospital: see Vol. XXVI. p. 563.]

[The inscription may be rendered (Ayr for Eier, i.e., cannon-balls):—

"I be a churl both rough and rude;

Who tastes my eggs will get no good."

(Note by W. G. Collingwood in the Small Edition of Fors.)]

consider if He ever has said 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.

7. 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 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, not driven 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 this one out of the forty centuries since Abram?

66

"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;1-these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why,

1 [See the account given to Herodotus (ii. 55) by the priestesses of the oracle at Dodona: "They say that two black doves flew from Thebes in Egypt, and one of them came to Libya and the other to their land. And this latter settled upon an oak-tree and spoke with human voice, saying that it was necessary that a prophetic seat of Zeus should be established in that place."]

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 the beasts were divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?

8. 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 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 Shakespeare. 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

["And the priest shall bring it unto the altar, and wring off his head, and burn it on the altar; and the blood thereof shall be wrung out at the side of the altar :

"And he shall pluck away his crop with his feathers, and cast it beside the altar on the east part, by the place of the ashes:

"And he shall cleave it with the wings thereof, but shall not divide it asunder: and the priest shall burn it upon the altar, upon the wood that is upon the fire: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord" (Leviticus i. 15-17).

"And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the Lord for his sin which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats, for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin.

"And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass, which he hath committed, two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, unto the Lord; one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering.

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"And he shall bring them unto the priest, who shall offer that which is for the sin offering first, and wring off his head from his neck, but shall not divide it asunder:

"And he shall sprinkle of the blood of the sin offering upon the side of the altar; and the rest of the blood shall be wrung out at the bottom of the altar: it is a sin offering.

"And he shall offer the second for a burnt offering, according to the manner : and the priest shall make an atonement for him for his sin which he hath sinned, and it shall be forgiven him" (Leviticus v. 6-10).] 2 P

XXVIII.

burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,-do you? (Lev. v., 151); 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-Ion's mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.

9. 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, still Ephron's, wild with wood. "And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.” 3

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

1 ["If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things of the Lord; then he shall bring for his trespass unto the Lord a ram without blemish out of the flocks, with thy estimation by shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for a trespass offering."-Leviticus v. 15.]

p. 113.]

[For other references to Euripides's play, see Vol. XX. p. 365 and Vol. XXI. 3 [Genesis xv. 12.]

4 [W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885), F.R.S. See his lectures on "The Unconscious Action of the Brain' and "Epidemic Delusions" in Manchester Science Lectures for the People, third series, 1871.]

5 [See such articles as "Body and Mind" (Fortnightly Review, December 1874) and "The Ethics of Belief" (Contemporary Review, January 1877), both republished in his posthumous Lectures and Essays (1879); for “ sensory" and "motor nerves,

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,-noveltyhunters though you be.

"1

10. "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 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, Shakespeare, 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.

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

"2

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 and their processes, see, especially, vol. ii. pp. 39 seq., 45, 50: "Two actions of the brain which occur together form a link between themselves, so that the one being called up, the other is called up," etc. For another reference to W. K. Clifford (1845-1879), F.R.S., see Vol. XXIV. p. 448.]

1 [Genesis xv. 13.]

2 [Genesis xv. 16. For Eschol, the Amorite, see Genesis xiv. 13, 24; for the grapes of Eschol, Numbers xiii. 23.]