Considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly
builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through
patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of
it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the
record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of
many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and
multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various
with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with
a firkin of oil and a match and an easy "Let there not be," and the
many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth,
Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a
conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a
blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to
seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good,
and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. And looking
at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having a
practiced vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between
events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled
--like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of
distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or
a grasp--precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction?

It was half-past ten in the morning when Gwendolen Harleth, after her
gloomy journey from Leubronn, arrived at the station from which she
must drive to Offendene. No carriage or friend was awaiting her, for in
the telegram she had sent from Dover she had mentioned a later train,
and in her impatience of lingering at a London station she had set off
without picturing what it would be to arrive unannounced at half an
hour's drive from home--at one of those stations which have been fixed
on not as near anywhere, but as equidistant from everywhere. Deposited
as a _femme sole_ with her large trunks, and having to wait while a
vehicle was being got from the large-sized lantern called the Railway
Inn, Gwendolen felt that the dirty paint in the waiting-room, the dusty
decanter of flat water, and the texts in large letters calling on her
to repent and be converted, were part of the dreary prospect opened by
her family troubles; and she hurried away to the outer doo