I have, then, no commiseration for those who receive the kind of shocks we spoke of at the beginning of this chapter. If a man goes to the East with anti-historical and unreasonable expectations, there is nothing in the East, or the wide world, that can, so far as his expectations go, be of any use to him. Wherever he comes upon truth it will shock him. Nor do I think that travel in the East will be of advantage to the man whose minute apprehension is incapable of taking in anything higher than points of Zulu criticism. This is the criticism of people who, like those kraal-inhabiting, skinclad philosophers, are all for small particulars, and who appear to labour under a congenital incapacity for large views, and for general ideas. According to their logic, the best established general proposition in contingent matter is not only utterly false, but even inconceivable, if they can adduce a single case, or point even, in which it fails. If one of this sort were to find a burr on your clothes, he would be unable to see your clothes for the burr; or if he were to go so far beyond the burr as to form any opinion about your clothes, it would be that they were bad clothes, because of the burr. I have known a person of this kind so perverse, that if you had told him that his wife and children had been burnt to death on the first-floor of a house, the intelligence would have had no effect upon him, if he chanced to suppose that you were inaccurate, and were calling the ground-floor the first-floor. He would be incapable of attending to the intelligence you had brought him, till this had been rightly understood, and set right. Till that had been done, he would be unable to think of anything else, or talk of anything else. Such is the mind of the Zulu critic. Still, however, there is a place for him, and he is of use in the general scheme. But my late excursion to the East not only led to the question which stands at the head of this chapter having frequently been put me, and which may be regarded as illustrative of the mental condition of an educated stratum of society amongst us, but it also led to my obtaining the following illustration of the mental condition of the uneducated class amongst us. Shortly after my return I had the following conversation with one I knew to be a good specimen of that class—an honest, conscientious, religious soul. ‘They tell me, sir, you have been a long away off.’ ‘Yes, neighbour, I have been to Jerusalem.’ I thought Jerusalem might touch a chord, but was not sure that Egypt would. ‘What! Jerusalem, sir?’ with great surprise. ‘Yes: Jerusalem.’ ‘Now, sir, you have surprised me. I did not know that there was such a place as Jerusalem in the world. I had always thought that Jerusalem was only a Bible word.’ CHAPTER XXVII. THE HISTORICAL METHOD OF INTERPRETATION. God who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake in times past to the Fathers.—_Epistle to the Hebrews._