Similar quotations might be given from many sources and of the same repute and strength. But, leaving unfavorable generalizations on the one side to offset favorable ones on the other, it might be well to take the qualities of the people in detail and examine them from various points of view. Religion is perhaps the first and foremost influence. The creed of the Boer is based by universal admission upon the Old Testament. The love and light and liberty of the newer dispensation has no place in his belief or in his life. The Bible, as he reads it, permits slavery, tolerates concubinage, teaches the perpetual intervention of a personal Providence, and makes him as truly one of a chosen people as was ever Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. He lives upon the broad veldt of South Africa a patriarchal life not unlike in some respects that of the Hebrew of old, and he has thoroughly convinced himself that the British are to him what the Philistines were to the Jew, while the natives are intended to be his footstool as fully as ever were some of the surrounding races of Palestine to the heroes of Scripture. His religion is essentially a gloomy and serious one. There is no lighter side of life to him, and a text from the Old Testament is made to apply to most of the events of the day. Built into his character by isolation and intensified, in the crudest and wildest application, by an environment of inherited and continued ignorance, this religion has produced some very curious consequences. It has not made the Boer an enthusiast; it has simply rendered him contemptuous of all other creeds and sects to a degree of arrogance which is hard to meet and worse to endure. It has not had any softening influence, but rather a hardening one--making every prejudice stronger, every hatred more bitter, every avenue of intellectual expression more narrow and less susceptible to the forces of modern progress and education. It has developed into a more or less formal expression of defiant racial pride through the almost profane belief that the God of the Hebrews has become, essentially and entirely, the Providence of the Boers. The continuous use of Old Testament words and phrases has become a part of his individual life, though it usually means as little as do the continuous oaths of the cheerful sailor in the performance of his work. Ignorance has, in fact, crystallized the faith of his fathers into an extraordinarily narrow creed of which Tant' Sannie, in Olive Schreiner's _Story of an African Farm_, presents one of many picturesque embodiments: