[1] Abram’s mountain home seems to have been much like Horace’s, as far as I can make out: but see accounts of modern travellers. Our translation “in the plain of Mamre” (Genesis xiii. 28; xiv. 13) is clearly absurd; the gist of the separation between Lot and Abram being Lot’s choice of the plain, as ‘the Paradise of God,’ and Abram’s taking the rock ground. The Vulgate says ‘in the ravine’ of Mamre; the Septuagint, ‘by the oak.’ I doubt not the Hebrew is meant to carry both senses, as of a rocky Vallombrosa; the Amorites at that time knew how to keep their rain, and guide their springs. Compare the petition of Caleb’s daughter when she is married, after being brought up on this very farm, Joshua xv. 17, 18; comparing also xiv. 14, 15, and of the hill country generally, xvi. 15, and Deut. xi. 10–12, 17. [↑]
[2] I need scarcely desire the reader to correct the misprint of ‘maternal’ for ‘paternal’ in line 14 of p. 90 in Fors of March. In last Fors, please put the i into ‘material’ in p. 112, line 16, and a comma before and after ‘there’ in p. 113, line 8. [↑]
[3] Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In ‘Old Mortality’ alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one, Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. His last battle-cry—“Down with the Amorites,” the chief Amorite being Lord Evandale, is intensely illustrative of all I have asked you to learn to-day. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the ‘Heart of Midlothian,’ and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ‘Rob Roy,’ and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period. [↑]
[4] For accounts in London, to save drawing small cheques. I have not room for detail this month, the general correspondence being lengthy. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
[All Signed Petitions against Rydal Railway to be sent immediately to me at Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.]
LETTER LXVI.
Brantwood, 14th May, 1876.
Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.