thumb and con in remote villages but will help to
regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish
girls. So 'Celia' felt, so 'Clifford' acted: the foolish Theorem of
Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice
one day. Consider whether any _Rune_ in the wildest imagination of
Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some
Books have done! What built St Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of
the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK,--the word partly of the
man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand
years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of
things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which
Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant
corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It
related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the
Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all
places with this our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for
men; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching,
governing, and all else.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable,
respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is
modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books.
Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while a
man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those
circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should
do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a
necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must
go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty-thousand, went
to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any
other teacher who had something of his own to teach, there was a great
convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already
assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. For
any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the
more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice
of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools
into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and
named it _Universitas_, or School of all Sciences: the University of
Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all
subsequent Universit