Quit York for Manchester. — A Character.—Quaker Laay.—Peculiar Feature in the Husbandry of the Cloth District. — Leeds. — Simplicity manifested in the Geologic Framework of English Scenery. — The Denuding Agencies almost invariably the sole Architects of the Landscape.— Manchester; characteristic Peculiarities ; the Irwell; Collegiate Church; light and elegant Proportions of the Building; its grotesque Sculptures; these indicative of the Scepticism of the Age in which they were produced. — St. Bartholomew’s Day. — Sermon on Saints’ Day.— Timothy’s Grandmother. — The Puseyite a High Churchman become earnest. — Passengers of a Sunday Evening Train. — Sabbath Amusements not very conducive to Happiness. — The Economic Value of the Sabbath ill understood by the Utilitarian. — Testimony of History on the point.

On the following morning I quitted York for Manchester, taking Leeds in my way. I had seen two of the ecclesiastical cities of Old England, and I was now desirous to visit two of the great trading towns of the modem country, so famous for supplying with its manufactures half the economic wants of the world.

At the first stage from York, we were joined by a young-lady passenger, of forty or thereabouts, evidently a character. She was very gaudily dressed, and very tightly laced, and had a bloom of red in her cheeks that seemed to have been just a little assisted by art, and a bloom of red in her nose that seemed not to have been assisted by art at all. Alarmingly frank and portentously talkative, she at once threw herself for protection and guidance on “ the gentlemen.” She had to get down at one of the intermediate stages, she said; but were she to be so unlucky as to pass it, she would not know what to do, — she would be at her wit’s end; but she trusted she would not be permitted to pass it: she threw herself upon the generosity of the gentlemen, — she always did, indeed; and she trusted the generous gentlemen would inform her, when she came to her stage, that it was time for her to get out. I had rarely seen, except in old play-books, written when our dramatists of the French school were drawing ladies’-maids of the time of Charles the Second, a character of the kind quite so stage-like in its aspect; and in a quiet way was enjoying the exhibition. And the passenger who sat fronting me in the carriage — an elderly lady of the Society of Friends — was, I found, enjoying it quite as much and as quietly as myself. A countenance of much transparency, that had been once very pretty, exhibited at every droll turn in the dialogue the appropriate expression. Remarking to a gentleman beside me that good names were surely rather a scant commodity in England, seeing they had not a few towns and rivers, which, like many of the American ones, seemed to exist in duplicate and triplicate, — they had three Newcastles, and four Stratfords, and at least two river Ouses, — I asked him how I could travel most directly by railway to Cowper’s Ouse. He did not know, he said; he had never heard of a river Ouse except the Yorkshire one, which 1 had just seen. The Quaker lady supplied me with the information I wanted, by pointing out the best route to Olney; and the circumstance led to a conversation which only terminated at our arrival at Leeds. I found her possessed, like many of the Society of Friends, whom Howitt so well describes, of literary taste, conversational ability, and extensive information; and we expatiated together over a wide range. We discussed English poets and poetry; compared notes regarding our critical formulas and canons, and found them wonderfully alike; beat over the Scottish Church question, and some dozen or so other questions besides; and at parting, she invited me to visit, her at her house in Bedfordshire, within half a day’s journey of Olney. She was at present residing with a friend, she said; but she would be at home in less than a fortnight; and there was much in her neighborhood which, she was sure, it would give me pleasure to see. I was unable ultimately to avail myself of her kindness; but in the hope that these chapters may yet meet her eye, I must be permitted to reiterate my sincere thanks for her frank and hospitable invitation. The frankness struck me at the time as characteristically English; while the hospitality associated well with all I had previously known of the Society of Friends.

I marked, in passing on to Leeds, a new feature in the husbandry of the district, — whole fields of teazles, in flower at the time, waving gray in the breeze. They indicated that I was approaching the great centre of the cloth-trade in England. The larger heads of this plant, bristling over with their numerous minute hooks, are employed as a kind of brushes or combs for raising the nap of the finer broadcloths; and it seems a curious enough circumstance that, in this mechanical age, so famous for the ingenuity and niceness of its machines, no effort of the mechanician has as yet enabled him to supersede, or even to rival, this delicate machine of nature’s making. I failed to acquaint myself very intimately with Leeds: the rain had again returned, after a brief interval of somewhat less that two days; and I saw, under cover of my old friend the umbrella, but the outsides of the two famous cloth-halls of the place, where there are more woollen stuffs bought and sold than in any other dozen buildings in the world; and its long uphill-street of shops', with phlegmatic Queen Anne looking grimly adown the slope, from her niche of dingy sandstone. On the following morning, which was wet and stormy as ever, I took the railway train for Manchester, which I reached a little after mid-day.

In passing through Northumberland, I had quitted the hilly district when I quitted the Mountain Limestone and Millstone Grit; and now, in travelling on to Manchester, I had, I found, again got into a mountainous, semi-pastoral country. There were deep green valleys, traversed by lively tumbling streams, that opened on either hand among the hills; and the course of the railway train was, for a time, one of great vicissitude, — now elevated high on an embankment, now burrowing deep in a tunnel. It is, the traveller finds, the same Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone which form the hilly regions of Northumberland, that give here their hills and valleys to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire; and that, passing on to Derby, in the general south-western range of the English formations, compose the Peak, so famous for its many caves and chasms, with all the picturesque groups of eminences that surround it. There are few things which so strike the Scotch geologist who visits England for the first time, as the simplicity with which he finds he can resolve the varying landscape into its geologic elements. The case is different in Scotland, where he has to deal, in almost every locality, with both the denuding and the Plutonic agents, and where, as in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, many independent centres of internal action, grouped closely together, connect the composition of single prospects with numerous and very varied catastrophes. But in most English landscapes one has to deal with the denuding agents alone. In passing along an open sea-coast, on which strata of the Secondary or Palaeozoic formations have been laid bare, one finds that the degree of prominence exhibited by the bars and ridges of rock exposed to the waves corresponds always with their degree of tenacity and hardness. A bed of soft shale or clay we find represented by a hollow trough; the surf has worn it down till it can no longer be seen, and a strip of smooth gravel rests over it; a stratum of sandstone, of the average solidity, rises above the hollow like a mole, for the waves have failed to wear the sandstone down; while a band of limestone or chert we find rising still higher, because still better suited, from its great tenacity, to resist the attrition of the denuding agents. And such, on a great scale, is the principle of what one may term the geologic framework of English landscape. The softer formations of the country we find represented, like the shale-beds on the shore, by wide flat valleys or extensive plains; the harder, by chains of hills of greater or lesser altitude, according to the degree of solidity possessed by the composing material. A few insulated districts of country, such as part of North Wales, Westmoreland, and Cornwall, where the Plutonic agencies have been active, we find coming under the more complex law of Scottish landscape ; but in all the rest, — save where here and there a minute trappean patch imparts its inequalities to the surface, as in the Dudley coalfield, — soft or hard, solid or incoherent, determines the question of high or low, bold or tame. Here, for instance, is a common map of England, on which the eminences are marked, but not the geologic formations. These, however, we may almost trace by the chains of hills, or from the want of them. This hilly region, for instance, which extends from the northern borders of Northumberland to Derby, represents the Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone, — solid deposits of indurated sandstone and crystalline lime, that stand up amid the landscape like the harder strata on the wave-worn sea-coast. On both sides of this mountainous tract there are level plains of vast extent, that begin to form on the one side near Newcastle, and at Lancaster on the other, and which, uniting at Wirks-worth, sweep on to the Bristol Channel in the diagonal line of the English formations. These level plains represent the yielding, semi-coherent New Red Sandstone of England. The denuding agents have worn it down in the way we find the soft shale-beds worn down on the sea-shore. On the west we see it flanked by the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian systems of Wales and western England, — formations solid enough to form a hilly country; and on the east, by a long hilly line, that, with little interruption, traverses the island diagonally from Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, to Lyme Regis on the English Channel. This elevated line traverses longitudinally the Oolitic formation, and owes its existence to those coralline reefs and firm calcareous sandstones of the system that are so Extensively used by the architect. Another series of hilly ridges, somewhat more complicated in their windings, represent the Upper and Lower Chalk; while the softer Weald, Gault, Greensand, and Tertiary deposits, we find existing as level plains or wide shallow valleys. In most of our geologic maps the hill-ranges are not indicated; but in a country such as England, where these are so palpably a joint result of the geologic formations and the denuding agencies, the omission is surely a defect.

Manchester I found as true a representative of the great manufacturing town of modern England, as York of the old English ecclesiastical city. One receives one’s first intimation of its existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it. There is a murky blot in one section of the sky, however clear the weather, which broadens and heightens as we approach, until at length it seems spread over half the firmament. And now the innumerable chimneys come in view, tall and dim in the dun haze, each bearing atop its own troubled pennon of darkness, And now we enter the suburbs, and pass through mediocre streets of brick, that seem as if they had been built wholesale by contract within the last half-dozen years. These humble houses are the homes of the operative manufacturers. The old walls of York, built in the reign of Edward the First, still enclose the city; — the antique suit of armor made for it six hundred years ago, though the fit be somewhat of the tightest, buckles round it still. Manchester, on the other hand, has been doubling its population every half-century for the last hundred and fifty years ; and the cord of cotton twist that would have girdled it at the beginning of the great revolutionary war, would do little more than half-girdle it now. The field of Peterloo, on which the yeomanry slashed down the cotton-workers assembled to hear Henry Hunt, — poor lank-jawed men, who would doubtless have manifested less interest in the nonsense of the orator, had they been less hungry at the time, — has been covered with brick for the last ten years.

As we advance, the town presents a new feature. We see whole streets of warehouses, — dead, dingy, gigantic buildings, barred out from the light; and, save where here and there a huge wagon stands, lading or unlading under the mid-air crane, the thoroughfares, and especially the numerous cul de sacs, have a solitary, half-deserted air. But the city clocks have just struck one, — the dinner hour of the laboring English ; and in one brief minute two-thirds of the population of the place have turned out into the streets. The rush of the human tide is tremendous, — headlong and arrowy as that of a Highland river in flood, or as that of a water-spout just broken amid the hills, and at once hurrying adowna hundred different ravines. But the outburst is short as fierce: we have stepped aside into some door-way, or out towards the centre of some public square, to be beyond the wind of such commotion; and in a few minutes all is over, and the streets even more quiet and solitary than before. There is an air of much magnificence about the public buildings devoted to trade; and the larger shops wear the solid aspect of long-established business. But nothing seems more characteristic of the great manufacturing city, though disagreeably so, than the river Irwell, which runs through the place, dividing it into a lesser and larger town, that, though they bear different names, are essentially one. The hapless river—a pretty enough stream a few miles higher up, with trees overhanging its banks, and fringes of green sedge set thick along its edges — loses caste as it gets among the mills and the print-works. There are myriads of dirty things given it to wash, and whole wagonloads of poisons from dye-houses and bleach-yards thrown into it to carry away; steam-boilers discharge into it their seething contents, and drains and sewers their fetid impurities; till at length it rolls on, — here between tall dingy walls, there under precipices of red sandstone, — considerably less a river than a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except perhaps the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud volcano. In passing along where the river sweeps by the old Collegiate Church, I met a party of town-police dragging a female culprit — delirious, dirty, and in drink — to the police-office ; and I bethought me of the well-known comparison of Cowper, beginning,

“Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade,
Apt emblem of a virtuous maid,” —

of the maudlin woman not virtuous, — and of the Irwell. According to one of the poets contemporary with him of Olney, slightly altered,

“In spite of fair Zelinda’s charms,
And all her hards express,
Poor Lyee made as true a stream,
And I but flattered less.”

I spent in Manchester my first English Sabbath; and as I had crossed the border, not to see countrymen, nor to hear such sermons as I might hear every Sunday at home, I went direct to the Collegiate Church. This building — a fine specimen of the florid Gothic — dates somewhere about the time when the Council of Constance was deposing Pope John for his enormous crimes, and burning John Huss and Jerome of Prague for their wholesome opinions; and when,-though Popery had become miserably worn out as a code of belief, the revived religion of the New Testament could find no rest for the sole of its foot amid a wide weltering flood of practical infidelity and epicurism in the Church, and gross superstition and ignorance among the laity. And the architecture and numerous sculptures of the pile bear meet testimony to the character of the time. They approve themselves the productions of an age in which the priest, engaged in his round of rite and ceremony, could intimate knowingly to a brother priest, without over-much exciting lay suspicion, that he knew his profession to be but a joke. Some of the old Cartularies curiously indicate this state of matters. “The Cartulary of Moray,” says an ingenious writer in the North British “contains the Constitutiones Lyncolnienses, inserted as proper rules for the priests of that northern province, from which we learn that they were to enter the place of worship, not with insolent looks, but decently and in order; and were to be guilty of no laughing, or of attempting the perpetration of any base jokes ( turpirisu aut jocu), and at the same time to conduct their whisperings in an under tone. A full stomach, however, is not the best provocative to lively attention; and it is therefore far from wonderful that the fathers dozed. Ingenuity provided a remedy even for this; and the curious visitor will find in the niches of the ruined walls of the ecclesiastical edifices of other days oscillating seats, which turn upon a pivot, and require the utmost care of the sitter to keep steady. The poor monk who would dare to indulge in one short nap would by this most cruel contrivance be thrown forward upon the stone-floor of the edifice, to the great danger of his neck, and be covered at the same time with the ‘base laughter and joking’ of his brethren.”

Externally the Collegiate Church is sorely wasted and much blackened; and. save at some little distance, its light and elegant proportions fail to tell. The sooty atmosphere of the place has imparted to it its own dingy hue; while the soft New Red Sandstone of which it is built has resigned all the nicer tracery intrusted to its keeping to the slow wear of the four centuries which have elapsed since the erection of the edifice. But in the interior all is fresh and sharp as when the field of Bosworth was stricken. "What first impresses as unusual is the blaze of light which fills the place. For the expected dim solemnity of an old ecclesiastical edifice, one finds the full glare of a modern assembly-room; the day-light streams in through numerous windows, mullioned with slim shafts of stone curiously intertwisted atop, and plays amid tall slender columns, arches of graceful sweep, and singularly elegant groinings, that shoot out their clusters of stony branches, light and graceful as the expanding boughs of some lime or poplar grove. The air of the place is gay, not solemn; nor are the subjects of its numerous sculptures of a kind suited to deepen the impression. Not a few of the carvings which decorate every patch of wall are of the most ludicrous character.

Rows of grotesque heads look down into the nave from the spandrels: some twist their features to the one side of the face, some to the other; some wink hard, as if exceedingly in joke; some troll out their tongue; some give expression to a lugubrious mirth, others to a ludicrous sorrow. In the choir, — of course, a still holier part of the edifice than the nave, — the sculptor seems to have let his imagination altogether run riot. In one compartment there sits, with a birch over his shoulder, an old fox, stern of aspect as Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, engaged in teaching two cubs to read. In another, a respectable-looking hoar, elevated on his hind legs, is playing on the bag-pipe, while his hopeful family, four young pigs, are dancing to his music behind their trough. In yet another, there is a hare, contemplating with evident satisfaction a boiling pot, which contains a dog in a fair way of becoming tender. But in yet another the priestly designer seems to have lost sight of prudence and decorum altogether : the chief figure in the piece is a monkey administering extreme unction to a dying man, while a party of other monkeys are plundering the poor sufferer of his effects, and gobbling up his provisions. A Scotch Highlander’s faith in the fairies is much less a reality now than it has been; but few Scotch Highlanders would venture to take such liberties with their neighbors the “good people,” as the old ecclesiastics of Manchester took with the services of their religion.

It is rather difficult for a stranger in such a place to follow with strict attention the lesson of the day. To the sermon, however, which was preached in a surplice, I found it comparatively easy to listen. The Sabbath — a red-letter one — was the twice famous St. Bartholomew’s day, associated in the history of Protestantism with the barbarous massacre of the French Huguenots, and in the history of Puritanism with the ejection of the English non-conforming ministers after the Restoration; and the sermon was a labored defence of saints’ days in general, and of the claims of St. Bartholomew’s day in particular. There was not a very great deal known of St. Bartholomew, said the clergyman; but this much at least we all know, — he was a good man, — an exceedingly good man : it would be well for us to be all like him; and it was evidently our duty to be trying to be as like him as we could. As for saints’ days, there could be no doubt about them: they were very admirable things; they had large standing in tradition, as might be seen from ecclesiastical history, and the writings of the later fathers; and large standing, too, in the Church of England, — a fact which no one acquainted with “our excellent Prayer-Book ” could in the least question ; nay, it would seem as if they had even some standing in Scripture itself. Did not St. Paul remind Timothy of the faith that had dwelt in Lois and Eunice, his grandmother and mother ? and had we not therefore a good Scriptural argument for keeping saints’ days, seeing that Timothy must have respected the saint his grandmother ? I looked round me to see how the congregation was taking all this, but the congregation bore the tranquil air of people quite used to such sermons. There were a good many elderly gentlemen who had dropped asleep, and a good many more who seemed speculating in cotton; but the general aspect was one of heavy, inattentive decency: there was, in short, no class of countenances within the building that bore the appropriate expression, save the stone countenances on the wall.

My fellow-guests in the coffee-house in which I lodged were, an English Independent, a man of some intelligence, — and a young Scotchman, a member of the Relief body. They had been hearing, they told me, an excellent discourse, in which the preacher had made impressive allusion to the historic associations of the day; in especial, to the time

“When good Coligny’s hoary hair was dabbled all in blood.”

I greatly tickled them, by giving them, in turn, a simple outline, without note or comment, of the sermon I had been hearing. The clergyman from whom it emanated, maugre his use of the surplice in the pulpit, and his zeal for saints’ days, was, I was informed, not properly a Puseyite, but rather one of the class of stiff High Churchmen, that germinate into Puseyites when their creed becomes vital within them. For the thorough High Churchman bears, it would appear, the same sort of resemblance to the energetic Puseyite, that a dried bulb in the florist’s drawer does to a bulb of the same species in his flower-garden, when swollen with the vegetative juices, and rich in leaf and flower. It is not always the most important matters that take the strongest hold of the mind. The sermon and the ludicrous carvings, linked as closely together, by a trick of the associative faculty, as Cruikshank’s designs in Oliver Twist with the letter-press of Dickens, continued to haunt me throughout the evening.

I lodged within a stone-cast of the terminus of the Great Manchester and Birmingham Railway. I could hear the roaring of the trains along the line, from morning till near midday, and during the whole afternoon ; and, just as the evening was setting in, I sauntered down to the gate by which a return train was discharging its hundreds of passengers, fresh from the Sabbath amusements of the country, that I might see how they looked. There did not seem much of enjoyment about the wearied and somewhat draggled groups: they wore, on the contrary, rather an unhappy physiognomy, as if they had missed spending the day quite to their minds, and were now returning, sad and disappointed, to the round of toil, from which it ought to have proved a sweet interval of relief. A congregation just dismissed from hearing a vigorous evening discourse would have borne, to a certainty, a more cheerful air. There was not much actual drunkenness among the crowd, — thanks to the preference which the Englishman gives to his ale over ardent spirits, — not a tithe of what I would have witnessed, on a similar occasion, in my own country. A few there were, however, evidently muddled; and I saw one positive scene. A young man considerably in liquor had quarrelled with his mistress, and, threatening to throw himself into the Irwell, off he had bolted in the direction of the river. There was a shriek of agony from the young woman, and a cry of “stop him, stop him,” to which a tall, bulky Englishman, of the true John Bull type, had coolly responded, by thrusting forth his foot as he passed, and tripping him at full length on the pavement; and for a few minutes all was hubbub and confusion. With, however, this exception, the aspect of the numerous passengers had a sort of animal decency about it, which one might in vain look for among the Sunday travellers on a Scotch railway. Sunday seems greatly less connected with the fourth commandment in the humble English mind than in that of Scotland, and so a less disreputable portion of the people go abroad. There is a considerable difference, too, between masses of men simply ignorant of religion, and masses of men broken loose from it; and the Sabbath-contemning Scotch belong to the latter category. With the humble Englishman trained up to no regular habit of church-going, Sabbath is pudding-day, and clean-shirt-day, and a day for lolling on the grass opposite the sun, and, if there be a river or canal hard by, for trying how the gudgeons bite, or, if in the neighborhood of a railway, for taking a short trip to some country inn, famous for its cakes and ale; but to the humble Scot become English in his Sabbath views, the day is, in most cases, a time of sheer recklessness and dissipation. There is much truth in the shrewd remark of Sir Walter Scott, that the Scotch, once metamorphosed into Englishmen, make very mischievous Englishmen indeed.

Among the existing varieties of the genus philanthropist, — benevolent men bent on bettering the condition of the masses, — there is a variety who would fain send out our working people to the country on Sabbaths, to become happy and innocent in smelling primroses, and stringing daisies on grass stalks. An excellent scheme theirs, if they but knew it, for sinking a people into ignorance and brutality, — for filling a country with gloomy workhouses, and the workhouses with unhappy paupers. ’Tis pity rather that the institution of the Sabbath, in its economic bearings, should not be better understood by the utilitarian. The problem which it furnishes is not particularly difficult, if one could be but made to understand, as a first step in the process, that it is really worth solving. The mere animal, that has to pass six days of the week in hard labor, benefits greatly by a seventh day of mere animal rest and enjoyment: the repose according to its nature proves of signal use to it, just because it is repose according to its nature. But man Is not a mere animal: what is best for the ox and the ass is not best for him; and in order to degrade him into a poor unintellectual slave, over whom tyranny, in its caprice, may trample rough-shod, it is but necessary to tie him down, animal-like, during his six working days, to hard, engrossing labor, and to convert the seventh into a day of frivolous, unthinking relaxation. History speaks with much emphasis on the point. The old despotic Stuarts were tolerable adepts in the art of kingcraft, and knew well what they were doing when they backed with their authority the Book of Sports. The merry, unthinking serfs, who, early in the reign of Charles the First, danced on Sabbaths round the Maypole, were afterwards the ready tools of despotism, and fought that England might be enslaved. The Ironsides, who, in the cause of civil and religious freedom, bore them down, were staunch Sabbatarians.

In no history, however, is the value of the Sabbath more strikingly illustrated than in that of the Scotch people during the seventeenth and the larger portion of the eighteenth centuries. Religion and the Sabbath were their sole instructors, and this in times so little favorable to the cultivation of mind, so darkened by persecution and stained with blood, that, in at least the earlier of these centuries, we derive our knowledge of the character and amount of the popular intelligence mainly from the death-testimonies of our humbler martyrs, here and there corroborated by the incidental evidence of writers such as Burnet.^ In these noble addresses from prison and scaffold, — the composition of men drafted by oppression almost at random from out the general mass, — we see how vigorously our Presbyterian people had learned to think, and how well to give their thinking expression. In the quieter times which followed the Revolution, the Scottish peasantry existed as at once the most provident and intellectual in Europe; and a moral and Burnet, afterwards the celebrated Whig Bishop, was one of six divines sent out by Archbishop Leighton, in 1670, to argue the Scotch people into Episcopacy. But the mission was by no means successful. “The people of the country,” says Burnet, “came generally to hear us, though not in great crowds. We were indeed amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be set to the power of princes in matters of religion. Upon all these topics they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to anything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them, — their cottagers and their servants.” (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 431.) instructed people pressed outwards beyond the narrow bounds of their country, and rose into offices of trust and importance in all the nations of the world. There were no Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in those days. But the Sabbath, was kept holy: it was a day from which every dissipating frivolity was excluded by a stern sense of duty. The popular mind, with weight imparted to it by its religious earnestness, and direction by the pulpit addresses of the day, expatiated on matters of grave import, of which the tendency was to concentrate and strengthen, not scatter and weaken, the faculties; and the secular cogitations of the week came to bear, in consequence, a Sabbath-day stamp of depth and solidity. The one day in the seven struck the tone for the other six. Our modern apostles of popular instruction rear up no such men among the masses as were developed under the Sabbatarian system in Scotland. Their aptest pupils prove but the loquacious gabbers of their respective workshops, — shallow super-ficialists, that bear on the surface of their minds a thin diffusion of ill-remembered facts and crude theories; and rarely indeed do we see them rising in the scale of society: they become Socialists by hundreds, and Chartists by thousands, and get no higher. The disseminator of mere useful knowledge takes aim at the popular ignorance; but his inept and unscientific gunnery does not include in its calculations the parabolic curve of man’s spiritual nature; and so, aiming direct at the mark, he aims too low, and the charge falls short.