t, if
ever I live to years, I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all
pretended discoveries, and receive them, if rational, how long soever I
have been used to another way of thinking. I am too dogmatical; I have
too much of egotism; my disposition is always to be telling of my dislike
and my scorn.' What a fine, fresh, fruitful, progressive, and peaceful
world we should soon have if all our old and all our fast-ageing men
would enter that extract into their diary! How the young would then love
and honour and lean upon the old; and how all the fathers would always
abide young and full of youthful life like their children! Then the
righteous should flourish like the palm-tree; he should grow like a cedar
in Lebanon. They that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish
in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age;
they shall be fat and flourishing. What a free scope would then be given
to all God's unfolding providences, and what a warm welcome to all His
advancing truths! What sore and spreading wounds would then be salved,
what health and what vigour would fill all the body political, as well as
all the body mystical! May the Lord turn the heart of the fathers to the
children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest the earth
be smitten with a curse!

3. Mr. Prejudice was an old man; and this also has been handed down
about him, that he was almost always angry. And if you keep your eyes
open you will soon see how true to the life that feature of old Mr.
Prejudice still is. In every conversation, discussion, debate,
correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and,
according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of
his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has
already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so
much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his
understanding for you to think that there is anything to be said in that
matter that he has not long ago heard said and fully answered. Has he
not denounced that bad man and that bad cause for years? You insult me,
sir, by again opening up that matter in my presence. He will have none
of you or of your arguments either. You are as bad yourself as that bad
man is whose advocate you are. We all know men whose hearts are full of
coals of juniper, burning coals of hate and rage, just by reason of