Affectionately,
BERNAL LINFORD.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

“Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.”  I am sending you a little book.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Dear Old Man: How am I going to thank you for the “little book”—­for Butler’s Analogy?  Or rather, how shall I forgive you for keeping it from me all these years?  I see that you acquired it in 1863—­and I never knew!  I must tell you that I looked upon it with suspicion when I unwrapped it—­a suspicion that the title did not allay.  For I recalled the last time you gave me a book—­the year before I came here.  That book, my friend, was “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.”  I began it with deep respect for you.  I finished with a profound distrust of all Abyssinians and an overwhelming grief for the untimely demise of Mrs. Johnson—­for you had told me that the good doctor wrote this book to get money to bury her.  How the circle of mourners for that estimable woman must have widened as Rasselas made its way out into the world!  Oh, Grandad, if only they had been able to keep her going some way until he needn’t have done it!  If only she could have been spared until her son got in a little money from the Dictionary or something!

All of which is why I viewed with unfriendly distrust your latest gift, the Analogy of Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop of Durham.  But, honestly, old man, did you know how funny it was when you sent it?  It’s funnier than any of the books of Moses, without being bloody.  What a dear, innocent old soul the Bishop is!  How sincerely he believes he is reasoning when he is merely doing a roguish two-step down the grim corridor of the eternal verities—­with a little jig here and there, and a pause to flirt his frock airily in the face of some graven image of Fact.  Ah, he is so weirdly innocent.  Even when his logical toes go blithely into the air, his dear old face is most resolutely solemn, and I believe he is never in the least aware of his frivolous caperings over the floor of induction.  Indeed, his unconsciousness is what makes him an unfailing delight.  He even makes his good old short-worded Saxon go in lilting waltz-time.

You will never know, Grandad, what this book has done for me.  I am stimulated in the beginning by this:  “From the vast extent of God’s dominion there must be some things beyond our comprehension, and the Christian scheme may be one of them.”  And at the last I am soothed with this heart-rending pas seul: “Concluding remarks by which it is clearly shown that those men who can evade the force of arguments so probable for the truth of Christianity undoubtedly possess dispositions to evil which would cause them to reject it, were it based on the most absolute demonstration.”  Is not that a pearl without price in this world of lawful conclusions?