verberated by trains of
correspondences and affinities laid deep in nature, and above all, too
affectingly transcribed in the human heart, ever to come within the
compass or material influence of a few words this way or that; any more
than all eternity can be really and locally confined within a little
golden ring which is assumed for its symbol. The same thing, I repeat,
may be said of chronology and its accidents. The chronologies of
Scripture, its prophetic weeks of Daniel, and its mysterious aeons of the
Apocalypse, are too awful in their realities, too vast in their sweep
and range of application, to be controlled or affected by the very
utmost errors that could arise from lapse of time or transcription
unrevised. And the more so, because errors that by the supposition are
errors of accident, cannot all point in one direction: one would be
likely in many cases to compensate another. But, finally, I would make
this frank acknowledgment to a young pupil without fear that it could
affect her reverence for Scripture. It is of the very grandeur of
Scripture that she can afford to be negligent of her chronology. Suppose
this case: suppose the Scriptures protected by no special care or
providence; suppose no security, no barrier to further errors, to have
arisen from the discovery of printing--suppose the Scriptures to be in
consequence transcribed for thousands of years--even in that case the
final result would be this: it would be (and in part perhaps it really
is) true or not true as to its minor or petty chronology--not true, as
having been altered insensibly like any human composition where the
internal sense was not of a nature to maintain its integrity. True, even
as to trifles, in that sense which the majestic simplicity and
self-conformity of truth in a tale originally true would guarantee, it
might yet be, because of the grandeur of the main aim, and the sense of
deeper relations and the perception of verisimilitude.

[25] '_A New Slave Country_'--and this for more reasons than one. Slaves
were growing dearer in Rome; secondly, a practice had been for some time
increasing amongst the richest of the noble families in Rome, of growing
household bodies of gladiators, by whose aid they fought the civic
battles of ambition; and thirdly, as to Caesar in particular, he had
raised and equipped a whole legion out of his own private funds, and, of
course, for his own private service; so that he probably looked to
Britain