read one for ages:  I must except “Old Mortality,” read last Vacation at Feniton; but I can’t deny that I like the study of languages for its own sake, though I apply my little experience in it wholly to the interpretation of the Bible.  I like improving my scholarship, it is true, but I can say honestly that it is used to read the Greek Testament with greater accuracy:  so of the Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic.  I feel, I confess, sometimes that it is nice, &c., to know several languages, but I try to drive away any such thoughts, and it is quite astonishing how, after a few weeks, a study which would suggest ideas of an unusual course of reading becomes so familiar that I never think of myself when pursuing it, e.g., I don’t think that after two hours’ grind at Arabic the stupid wrong feeling of its being an out-of-the-way study comes upon me now, it is getting quite natural.  It comes out though when I talk or write perhaps with another, but I must try and get over it.

’I believe it to be a good thing to break off any work once or twice a day in the middle of any reading, for meditating a little while and for prayer.  This is more easily done at College than elsewhere; and is, I hope, a preventive against such thoughts.  Then, as I jog on I see how very little I know, what an immense deal I have to learn to become ordinarily well acquainted with these things.  I am in that state of mind, perhaps, when Ecclesiastes (which I am now reading) puts my own case exactly before me.  I think, What’s the good of it all?  And the answer comes, it may be very good properly used, or very mischievous if abused.  I do indeed look forward to active parochial work:  I think I shall be very happy so employed, and I often try to anticipate the time in thought, and feel with perfect sincerity that nothing is so useful or so full of comfort as the consciousness of trying to fulfil the daily duties of my situation.  Here of course I need do nothing; I mean there is nothing to prevent my sitting all day in an arm-chair and reading “Pickwick."....  One word about the way languages help me, that you may not think what I am doing harder than it really is.  These three bear the same kind of relation to each other (or rather say these five, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Chaldee, Ethiopia; but of the last I know nothing whatever, and of Chaldee only so much as that it is a dialect of Hebrew in the same character, and consequently anyone who knows Hebrew knows something about it), as German to English, e.g., Bahlom (Arab.), Beel (Syr.), Baal (Heb.), are the same word, as you can see, only written in different characters, and all mean “a lord,” so Baal, Beelzebub, or Baalzebeb.  Baal Peor, which means, literally, “the Lord of the ravine,” viz., the idol worshipped at the Pass in the wilderness.  Consequently, in reading any one of these languages, the same word keeps on occurring in all; and the chief use is of course that often a word which occurs only