ere
vouchsafed of the Divine will, which brought clear light into the dark
places of life. He somewhat shocked the good but precise secretary of
the Bible Society by declaring in a letter from Spain that he had been
"very passionate in prayer during the last two or three days," and in
consequence, as he thought, saw his way "with considerable clearness": on
another occasion, by saying that he was "what the world calls exceedingly
superstitious" because he had changed some plan in consequence of a
dream; and again by saying, "My usual wonderful good fortune accompanied
me." For the last expression he apologised; but, whatever the particular
expression used, there can be no doubt that Borrow was a firm believer in
what our fathers called "particular providences," "leadings of the Divine
Spirit." He believed, for example, that he was doing the will of God in
circulating the Bible, and he also believed that God made his way plain
for so doing. We have known since Borrow another great Englishman who
held a similar faith, Charles Gordon; and the lives of both supply so
many instances of what look like acts of special protection, that the
question will present itself to the student of their lives whether there
may not be some such connexion between faith and miracle, as our Saviour
asserted. At any rate, we shall never understand Borrow if we exclude
from our notion of religion the idea of the miraculous, meaning by that
word not the contravention of natural law, but the providential guidance
of events.

There is one special side of this doctrine of Providence which must be
referred to specially, because Borrow himself calls attention to it in
the curious commentary which he annexed to "The Romany Rye"; the doctrine
so familiar to the last generation in the poems of Browning, that
trouble, to which "man is born, as the sparks fly upward," is ordained by
the Creator as a stimulus to endeavour, because "where least man suffers,
longest he remains." Some of you may remember that he argues in that
appendix that the old man who had learnt Chinese to distract his mind
would have played but a sluggard's part in life if no affliction had
befallen him, since he had never taken the pains to learn how to tell the
time from a clock. "Nothing but extreme agony," says Borrow, "could have
induced such a man to do anything useful." And every one will recall the
passage in "Lavengro" where he speaks of the fit of horrors that attacked