to be rejected as absolutely untrue. The fact
is, that all permanent truth is as one of those coal measures, a seam of
which lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground, but
which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out; beneath it
there comes a labour of sand and clay, and then at last the true seam of
precious quality, and in virtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which
is on the surface is rarely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has
been worked out and done with--as in the case of the apparent flatness of
the earth--that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the
Lord to conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out. If
my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had some
judicious and wide-minded friend, to correct and supplement the mainly
admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he
would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he
fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and
unspiritual as the other--each impressed with one aspect of religious
truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded
and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early
manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he showed every
sign of being likely to develop into one of those who can never see more
than one side of a question at a time, in spite of their seeing that side
with singular clearness of mental vision. In after life, he often met
with mere lads who seemed to him to be years and years in advance of what
he had been at their age, and would say, smiling, "With a great sum
obtained I this freedom; but thou wast free-born."

Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and laborious
growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over early
luxuriant. Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with which
he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the greatest
painters had begun with a hard and precise manner, from which they had
only broken after several years of effort; and that in like manner all
the early schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the
exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true; but in my brother's case
there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a
commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could
have fo