hink that they can hardly be
caught too young and taught decency, if not mansuetude. But I do
not remember, as a child, feeling any horror about it, or any
difficulty in reconciling the two concepts. Children _are_ a bit
bloodthirsty, and I observe that two volumes of the late Captain
Mayne Reid--"The Rifle Rangers," and "The Scalp Hunters"--have
just found their way into The World's Classics and are advertised
alongside of Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies" and the "De Imitatione
Christi." I leave you to think this out; adding but this for a
suggestion: that as the Hebrew outgrew his primitive tribal
beliefs, so the bettering mind of man casts off the old clouts of
primitive doctrine, he being in fact better than his religion.
You have all heard preachers trying to show that Jacob was a
better fellow than Esau somehow. You have all, I hope, rejected
every such explanation. Esau was a gentleman: Jacob was not. The
instinct of a young man meets that wall, and there is no passing
it. Later, the mind of the youth perceives that the writer of
Jacob's history has a tribal mind and supposes throughout that
for the advancement of his tribe many things are permissible and
even admirable which a later and urbaner mind rejects as
detestably sharp practice. And the story of Jacob becomes the
more valuable to us historically as we realise what a hero he is
to the bland chronicler.

VII

But of another thing, Gentlemen, I am certain: that we were badly
taught in that these books, while preached to us as equivalent,
were kept in separate compartments. We were taught the books of
Kings and Chronicles as history. The prophets were the Prophets,
inspired men predicting the future which they only did by chance,
as every inspired man does. Isaiah was never put into relation
with his time at all; which means everything to our understanding
of Isaiah, whether of Jerusalem or of Babylon. We ploughed
through Kings and Chronicles, and made out lists of rulers, with
dates and capital events. Isaiah was all fine writing about
nothing at all, and historically we were concerned with him only
to verify some far-fetched reference to the Messiah in this or
that Evangelist. But there is not, never has been, really fine
literature--like Isaiah--composed about nothing at all: and in
the mere matter of prognostication I doubt if such experts as
Zadkiel and Old Moore have anything to fear from any School of
Writing we can build up in Cambridge. But if we h