I made a mistake in The Authoress of the Odyssey [in a note on p. 31] when I said “Scheria means Jutland—a piece of land jutting out into the sea.” Jutland means the Land of the Jutes.
And I made a mistake in Alps and Sanctuaries [Chap. III], speaking of the peasants in the Val Leventina knowing English, when I said “One English word has become universally adopted by the Ticinesi themselves. They say ‘Waitee’ just as we should say ‘Wait’ to stop some one from going away. It is abhorrent to them to end a word with a consonant so they have added ‘ee,’ but there can be no doubt about the origin of the word.” The Avvocato Negri of Casale-Monferrato says that they have a word in their dialetto which, if ever written, would appear as “vuaitee,” it means “stop” or “look here,” and is used to attract attention. This, or something like it, no doubt is what they really say and has no more to do with waiting than Jutland has to do with jutting.
The Parables
The people do not act reasonably in a single instance. The sower was a bad sower; the shepherd who left his ninety and nine sheep in the wilderness was a foolish shepherd; the husbandman who would not have his corn weeded was no farmer—and so on. None of them go nearly on all fours, they halt so much as to have neither literary nor moral value to any but slipshod thinkers.
Granted, but are we not all slipshod thinkers?
The Irreligion of Orthodoxy
We do not fall foul of Christians for their religion, but for what we hold to be their want of religion—for the low views they take of God and of his glory, and for the unworthiness with which they try to serve him.
Society and Christianity
The burden of society is really a very light one. She does not require us to believe the Christian religion, she has very vague ideas as to what the Christian religion is, much less does she require us to practise it. She is quite satisfied if we do not obtrude our disbelief in it in an offensive manner. Surely this is no very grievous burden.