dignity and a strength about her
utterances that make us feel sure that she had always had a mind far
above her neighbours, Mrs. Bat's-eyes, Mrs. Light-mind, and Mrs. Know-
nothing. The first time she opens her mouth in our hearing she lets fall
an expression that Milton had just made famous in his _Samson_--

"Ease to the body some, none to the mind
From restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm
Of hornets armed no sooner found alone,
But rush upon me thronging, and present
Times past, what once I was, and what am now."

Nor can I leave this point without asserting it to you that no church and
no school of theology has ever developed the mind as well as sanctified
the heart of the common people like the preaching of the Puritan pulpit.
Matthew Arnold was not likely to over-estimate the good that Puritanism
had done to England. Indeed, in his earlier writings he sometimes went
out of his way to lament the hurt that the Puritan spirit had done to
liberality of life and mind in his native land. But in his riper years
we find him saying: "Certainly," he says, "I am not blind to the faults
of the Puritan discipline, but it has been an invaluable discipline for
that poor, inattentive, and immoral creature, man. And the more I read
history and the more I see of mankind, the more I recognise the value of
the Puritan discipline." And in that same Address he "founded his best
hopes for that so enviable and unbounded country in which he was
speaking, America, on the fact that so many of its millions had passed
through the Puritan discipline." John Milton was a product of that
discipline on the one hand, as John Bunyan was on the other. Christiana
was another of its products in the sphere of the family, just as Matthew
Arnold himself had some of his best qualities out of the same fruitful
school.

2. Her heart, her deep, strong, tender heart, is present on every page
of Christiana's noble history. Her heart keeps her often silent when the
water in her eyes becomes all the more eloquent. When she does let her
heart utter itself in words, her words are fine and memorable. As, for
one instance, after Greatheart's discourse on redemption. "O Mercy, that
thy father and mother were here; yea, and Mrs. Timorous also. Nay, I
wish with all my heart now that here was Madam Wanton, too. Surely,
surely, their hearts would be affected, nor could the fear of the one,
nor the powerful lusts of the other, prevail