have deliberately, and with no momentary shadow of suspicion or question,
formalized the spinous and monstrous fallacy that human commerce and policy
are _naturally_ founded on the desire of every man to possess his
neighbour's goods.

_This_ is the 'release unto us Barabbas,' with a witness; and the
deliberate systematization of that cry, and choice, for perpetual
repetition and fulfilment in Christian statesmanship, has been, with the
strange precision of natural symbolism and retribution, signed, (as of old,
by strewing of ashes on Kidron,) by strewing of ashes on the brooks of
Scotland; waters once of life, health, music, and divine tradition; but to
whose festering scum you may now set fire with a candle; and of which,
round the once excelling palace of Scotland, modern sanitary science is now
helplessly contending with the poisonous exhalations.

14. I gave this chapter its heading, because I had it in my mind to work
out the meaning of the fable in the ninth chapter of Judges, from what I
had seen on that thorny ground of mine, where the bramble was king over all
the trees of the wood. But the thoughts are gone from me now; and as I
re-read the chapter of Judges,--now, except in my memory, unread, as it
chances, for many a year,--the sadness of that story of Gideon fastens on
me, and silences me. _This_ the end of his angel visions, and dream-led
victories, the slaughter of all his {126} sons but this youngest,[34]--and
he never again heard of in Israel!

You Scottish children of the Rock, taught through all your once pastoral
and noble lives by many a sweet miracle of dew on fleece and ground,--once
servants of mighty kings, and keepers of sacred covenant; have you indeed
dealt truly with your warrior kings, and prophet saints, or are these ruins
of their homes, and shrines, dark with the fire that fell from the curse of
Jerubbael?

* * * * *

{127}

CHAPTER VIII.

THE STEM.

1. As I read over again, with a fresh mind, the last chapter, I am struck
by the opposition of states which seem best to fit a weed for a weed's
work,--stubbornness, namely, and flaccidity. On the one hand, a sternness
and a coarseness of structure which changes its stem into a stake, and its
leaf into a spine; on the other, an utter flaccidity and ventosity of
structure, which changes its stem into a riband, and its leaf into a
bubble. And before we go farther--for we are not yet at the end of our
s