ecepts engraved upon his mind
must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of
method. A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his
parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false
witness; for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of
duty.

Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it is case law
at the best which can be learned by precept. The letter is not only
dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be uttered,
alone is true and helpful. This is trite to sickness; but familiarity
has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty
from the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall dead
upon the ear after several repetitions. If you see a thing too often,
you no longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you no longer hear
it. Our attention requires to be surprised; and to carry a fort by
assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are
feats of about equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar
means. The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of
hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may bawl
himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his
hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace; they know all
he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell
and it cannot startle their composure. And so with this byword about
the letter and the spirit. It is quite true, no doubt; but it has no
meaning in the world to any man of us. Alas! it has just this meaning,
and neither more nor less: that while the spirit is true, the letter is
eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to mark out
the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never
so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression
of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has
made the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be
compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest;
circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more
inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and
are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole
world of leaves is sw