Alas! what is a precept?  It is at best an illustration; it is case law at the best which can be learned by precept.  The letter is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be uttered, alone is true and helpful.  This is trite to sickness; but familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions.  If you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you no longer hear it.  Our attention requires to be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar means.  The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure.  And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit.  It is quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man of us.  Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less:  that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect, clear, and stable like the earth.  But let a man set himself to mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed.  Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.  Look now for your shadows.  O man of formulae, is this a place for you?  Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?  Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of man?  Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new.  Can you or your heart say more?