sts attached the highest importance was
moral conduct, and their own spotless lives entitled them to be severe
in this respect, while their sermons made such an impression upon
me that during the whole of my youth I never once forgot their
injunctions. These sermons were so awe-inspiring, and many of the
remarks which they contained are so engraved upon my memory, that I
cannot even now recall them without a sort of tremor. For instance,
the preacher once referred to the case of Jonathan, who died for
having eaten a little honey. "_Gustans gustavi paululum mellis, et
ecce morior_." I lost myself in wonderment as to what this small
quantity of honey could have been which was so fatal in its effects.
The preacher said nothing to explain this, but heightened the effect
of his mysterious allusion with the words--pronounced in a very hollow
and lugubrious tone--_tetigisse periisse_. At other times the text
would be the passage from Jeremiah, "_Mors ascendit per fenestras_"
This puzzled me still more, for what could be this death which came
up through the windows, these butterfly wings which the lightest touch
polluted? The preacher pronounced the words with knitted brow and
uplifted eyes. But what perplexed me most of all was a passage in the
life of some saintly person of the seventeenth century who compared
women to firearms which wound from afar. This was quite beyond me,
and I made all manner of guesses as to how a woman could resemble
a pistol. It seemed so inconsistent to be told in one breath that a
woman wounds from afar, and in another that to touch her is perdition.
All this was so incomprehensible that I immersed myself in study, and
so contrived to clear my brain of it.

Coming from persons in whom I felt unbounded confidence, these
absurdities carried conviction to my very soul, and even now, after
fifty years' hard experience of the world[1] the impression has not
quite worn off. The comparison between women and firearms made me very
cautious, and not until age began to creep over me did I see that this
also was vanity, and that the Preacher was right when he said: "Go thy
way, eat thy bread joyfully ... with the woman whom thou lovest." My
ideas upon this head outlived my ideas upon religion, and this is
why I have enjoyed immunity from the opprobrium which I should not
unreasonably have been subjected to if it could have been said that I
left the seminary for other reasons than those derived from philology.