* * * * *

I have just found among my old archived papers, faded by nearly six decades of antiquity, a treatise which I wrote at nineteen, styled by me “A Vindication of the Wisdom of Scripture in Matters of Natural Science.”  This has never seen the light, even in extracts; and probably never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book.  Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points of view, many subjects, of which these are some:  Cosmogony, miracles (in chief Joshua’s sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, “He spreadeth out the north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing,” the blood’s innate vitality—­“which is the life thereof,” the earth’s centre, or orbit, and inclination, astronomy, spirits, the rainbow, the final conflagration of our atmosphere to purify the globe, and many other matters terrestrial and celestial.  Some day a patient scribe may be found to decipher this decayed manuscript and set out orderly its miscellaneous contents.  I began it at eighteen, and finished it when at Oxford.

There is also now before me another faded copybook of my early Christ Church days containing ninety-one striking parallel passages between Horace and Holy Writ; some being very remarkable, as Hor. Sat. i. 8, and Isaiah xliv. 13, &c., about “making a god of a tree whereof he burneth part:”  also such well-known lines as “Quid sit futurum eras, fuge quaerere,” and “Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernae crastina summae Tempora Di superi?”—­compared with “Take no thought for the morrow” and “Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”  With many more; in fact I collected nearly a hundred out of Horace, besides a few from others of the classics.

CHAPTER VIII.

SUNDRY PROVIDENCES.

Carlyle somewhere gives utterance to a truism, which the present scribe at least can most gratefully countersign, that “it takes a great deal of providence to bring a man to threescore years and ten.”  Not only are we in peril every time we take breath, both from the action of our own uncertain hearts and from the living germs of poison floating in the air, but from all sorts of outer accidents (so-called, whereas they all are “well ordered and sure”) wherewith our little life is compassed from, cradle to grave; in truth, trifles seem to rule us:  “the turning this way or that, the casual stopping or hastening hath saved life or destroyed it, hath built up or flung down fortunes.”  Every inch and every instant, we are guided and guarded, whether we notice it or not:  “the very hairs of our heads are all numbered.”  Here shall follow some personal experiences in proof.  Nearly seventy years ago I knew a small schoolboy of seven who accidentally