Juvenal, indeed, despite a certain foreign disregard for his meal-times, made such a practice of snatching morsels in transit that the sixteen-year old footman—chief of the many grievances which determined our separation—who outstayed him, has had to be severely reprimanded for making a clean sweep of the dishes that caught his young fancy, with a special partiality for roast chicken.
The new regimen—agreeable this hot weather—of soup, one cold-meat dish, salad, vegetable, sweet, and dessert—supper, in fact, instead of dinner—has, besides its intrinsic economy, the further advantage of diminishing the expenditure of kitchen coal to an almost incredible degree.
We who have to render an account hereafter, even of every idle word, shall we have to answer, we wonder, for all that unconscious waste which mere convention has induced in our homes? How many poor families might have been fed from the agglomeration of the Signora’s years of housekeeping! She did not think. No one thought. It has taken this scourge to make us stop in our easy course, to make us look into ourselves, into our ways.
“What can we do? What can we do without?” These must be now the mottoes written large round our house of life; and, indeed, the first includes the second, for it takes considerable energy to abstain.
“There is none that thinketh in his heart, therefore they shall go down alive into hell.”
A very disagreeable text, which comes disagreeably to the mind this Sunday morning, for the famiglia have just come back from church, where what is vulgarly called a “hell-fire sermon” was delivered by a Welsh preacher, who, though a Franciscan, is, one of his congregation declared, a revivalist lost to his native hills.
“You ought to go down into hell in spirit every day, me brethren,” he thundered, “or ye’ll very likely find yourselves there in the end. And what an off-ful thing that ’ud be! And there’s thousands and thousands of soa-ouls there this minute, better than you are!”
This was neither comforting, nor, we believe, theological, for the congregation was small, and, on the whole, devout. But no doubt there is a type of mind before which it is necessary to hold up a threat of everlasting punishment; the type of person whom conscription alone can move to serve his country before it is too late.
Not the least remarkable result of the German brutality is that the great majority of its opponents find themselves forced back into the old simplicity of belief. We can no longer afford to deny the existence of demons and their power; and if reason is to keep her balance and the soul her ultimate faith in Divine justice, acceptance of the doctrine of hell and adequate punishment must logically follow.