utter ignorance of all the plots and preparations of the Western world.  And Heaven and Hell are not unlike those ancient and over-peopled nations of Europe whose teeming millions must have an outlet to other lands.  Their life and their activity are too large and too rich for their original territories, and thus they are compelled to seek out colonies and dependencies, so that their surplus population may have a home.  And, in like manner, Heaven is too full of love and of blessedness to have all that for ever shut up within itself, and Hell is too full of envy and ill-will, and thus there continually come about those contentions and collisions of which the Holy War is full.  And, besides, it is with Mansoul and her neighbour states of Heaven and Hell just as it is with some of our great European empires in this also.  There is no neutral zone, no buffer state, no silver streak between Mansoul and her immediate and military neighbours.  And thus it is that her statesmen, and her soldiers, and even her very common-soldier sentries must be for ever on the watch; they must never say peace, peace; they must never leave for one moment their appointed post.

And then, as for the wall of the city, hear our excellent historian’s own words about that.  ‘The wall of the town was well built,’ so he says.  ’Yea, so fast and firm was it knit and compact together that, had it not been for the townsmen themselves, it could not have been shaken or broken down for ever.  For here lay the excellent wisdom of Him that builded Mansoul, that the walls could never be broken down nor hurt by the most mighty adverse potentate unless the townsmen gave their consent thereto.’  Now, what would the military engineers of Chatham and Paris and Berlin, who are now at their wits’ end, not give for a secret like that!  A wall impregnable and insurmountable and not to be sapped or mined from the outside:  a wall that could only suffer hurt from the inside!  And then that wonderful wall was pierced from within with five magnificently answerable gates.  That is to say, the gates could neither be burst in nor any way forced from without.  ’This famous town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out of which to go; and these were made likewise answerable to the walls; to wit, impregnable, and such as could never be opened or forced but by the will and leave of those within.  The names of the gates were these:  Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate; in short, ‘the five senses,’ as we say.

In the south of England, in the time of Edward the Confessor and after the battle of Hastings, there were five cities which had special immunities and peculiar privileges bestowed upon them, in recognition of the special dangers to which they were exposed and the eminent services they performed as facing the hostile shores of France.  Owing to their privileges and their position, the ‘Cinque Ports’ came to be cities of great strength, till, as time went on, they became a positive weakness rather than