We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the wisdom.

I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and minds were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in something beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to offer mankind as a guide of life.

All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir Thomas More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again to our own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible valour, self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of all wars,—­all have been filled with the love of God and have found therein a perfect serenity in the face of death, and that peace which passeth all understanding.

The character of our race rests indubitably upon that faith, and he who lifts his voice, or directs his pen, to tear it down, had better never have been born.

Your loving old
G.P.

[Footnote 1:  Another diary that you should read by and by is that of Henry Grabb Robinson.]

10

MY DEAR ANTONY,

In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that does not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary proper prose.  There are many writers whose general correctness and excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not select in these letters for your particular admiration.

By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to excursions in all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from my judgment, for everyone’s taste must vary a little from that of others.

English prose in its excellence follows the proportions manifested by the contours of the elevation of the world’s land.

Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the interminable outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books.  And, as each ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less land attains to it, and when the snow-line is approached only a very small proportion indeed of the land aspires so high.

So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender band compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains.

In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a mountaineer, nor a hearthstone for a granite peak.  Time slowly buries deep in oblivion the writings of the industrious and the dull.

Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in a former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into Bedford gaol, where he lay for conscience’ sake for twelve years.  “As I walked through the wilderness of this world,” said he, “I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream”; and the dream which he dreamed has passed into all lands, and has been translated into all languages, and has taken its place with the Bible and with the Imitation of Christ as a guide of life.