d columns. Nothing was finished, and
considered bit by bit all was coarse and ugly. Yet the general
effect was beautiful because it was an effect of design, the
picture of an artist who did not fully understand the
technicalities of painting, the work of a great writer who had as
yet no proper skill in words. Never did I see a small building
that struck me more. But then what experience have I of
buildings, and, as Anscombe reminded me afterwards, it was but a
copy of something designed when the world was young, or rather
when civilization was young, and man new risen from the infinite
ages of savagery, saw beauty in his dreams and tried to symbolize
it in shapes of stone.

We came to the broad stoep, to which several rough blocks of
marble served as steps. On it in a long chair made of native
wood and seated with hide rimpis, sat or rather lolled a man in a
dressing-gown who was reading a book. He raised himself as we
came and the light of the sun, for the verandah faced to the
east, shone full upon his face, so that I saw him well. It was
that of a man of something under forty years of age, dark,
powerful, and weary--not a good face, I thought. Indeed, it gave
me the impression of one who had allowed the evil which exists in
the nature of all of us to become his master, or had even
encouraged it to do so.

In the Psalms and elsewhere we are always reading of the
righteous and the unrighteous until those terms grow wearisome.
It is only of late years that I have discovered, or think that I
have discovered, what they mean. Our lives cannot be judged by
our deeds; they must be judged by our desires or rather by our
moral attitude. It is not what we do so much as what we try to
do that counts in the formation of character. All fall short,
all fail, but in the end those who seek to climb out of the pit,
those who strive, however vainly, to fashion failure to success,
are, by comparison, the righteous, while those who are content to
wallow in our native mire and to glut themselves with the daily
bread of vice, are the unrighteous. To turn our backs thereon
wilfully and without cause, is the real unforgiveable sin against
the Spirit. At least that is the best definition of the problem
at which I in my simplicity can arrive.

Such thoughts have often occurred to me in considering the
character of Dr. Rodd and some others whom I have known; indeed
the germ of them arose in my mind which, being wearied at the