A Dissenting minister, winding up a week's mission, is reported to have said, "And if any spark of grace has been kindled by these exercises, oh, we pray Thee, water that spark." A watered spark is good, but what of a harnessed volcano? When that eminent Civil servant, Sir Hugh Owen, retired from the Local Government Board, a gentleman wrote to the _Daily Chronicle_ in favour of "harnessing this by no means extinct volcano to the great task" of codifying the Poor Law. An old peasant-woman in Buckinghamshire, extolling the merits of her favourite curate, said to the rector, "I do say that Mr. Woods is quite an angel in sheep's clothing;" and Dr. Liddon told me of a Presbyterian minister who was called on at short notice to officiate at the parish church of Crathie in the presence of the Queen, and, transported by this tremendous experience, burst forth in rhetorical supplication--"Grant that as she grows to be an old woman she may be made a new man; and that in all righteous causes she may go forth before her people like a he-goat on the mountains." Undergraduates, whose wretched existence for a week before each examination is spent in the hasty acquisition of much ill-assorted and indigestible knowledge, are not seldom the victims of similar confusions. At Oxford--and, for all I know, at Cambridge too--a hideous custom prevails of placing before the examinee a list of isolated texts, and requiring him to supply the name of the speaker, the occasion, and the context. _Question_.--"'My punishment is greater than I can bear.' Who said this? Under what circumstances?" _Answer_.--"Agag, when he was hewn in pieces." One wonders at what stage of the process he began to think it was going a little too far. "What is faith?" inquired an examiner in "Pass-Divinity." "Faith is the faculty by which we are enabled to believe that which we know is not true," replied the undergraduate, who had learned his definition by heart, but imperfectly, from a popular cram-book. A superficial knowledge of literature may sometimes be a snare. "Can you give me any particulars of Oliver Cromwell's death?" asked an Examiner in History in 1874. "Oh yes, sir," eagerly replied the victim: "he exclaimed, 'Had I but served my God as I have served my King, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.'"