I think no one who has not tried painfully to lift and lead others can have the least notion of the difficulty which the country parson has to contend with in the extreme thinness of the stratum in which the rural intellect moves. Since the schools have given more attention to geography, and since emigration has brought us now and then some entertaining letters from those who have emigrated to “furren parts,” the people have slowly learnt to think of a wider area of _space_ than heretofore they could imagine. Though even now their notions of geography are almost as vague as their notions of astronomy; I have never seen a map in an agricultural labourer’s cottage. But their absolute ignorance of history amounts to an incapacity of conceiving the reality of anything that may have happened in past time. What their grandfathers have told them, that is to them history--everything before that is not so much as fable; it is not romance, it is a formless void, it is chaos. The worst of it is that they have no curiosity about the past. The same is true of their knowledge of anything approaching to the rudiments of physical science; it simply does not exist. A belief in the Ptolemaic system is universal in Arcady. I suspect that they think less about these things than they did. “That there old Gladstone, lawk! he’s a deep un he is! He’s as deep as the Pole Star he is!” said Solomon Bunch to me one day. “Pole Star?” I asked in surprise, “Where is the Pole Star, Sol?” “Lawks! I dunno; I’ve heard tell o’ the Pole Star as the deep un ever sin’ I was a booy!” It is this narrowness in their range of ideas that makes it so hard for the townsman to become an effective speaker to the labourers. You could not make a greater mistake than by assuming you have only to use plain _language_ to our rustics. So far from it, they love nothing better than sonorous words, the longer the better. It is when he attempts to make his audience follow a chain of reasoning that the orator fails most hopelessly, or when he comes to his illustrations. The poor people _know_ so little, they read nothing, their experience is so confined, that one is very hard put to it to find a simile that is intelligible. “Young David stood before the monarch’s throne. With harp in hand he touched the chords, like some later Scald he sang his saga to King Saul!” It really was rather fine--plain and simple too, monosyllabic, terse, and with a musical sibillation. Unfortunately one of the worthy preacher’s hearers told me afterwards with some displeasure that “he didn’t hold wi’ David being all sing-songing and scolding, he’d no opinion o’ that.” The stories of the queer mistakes which our hearers make in interpreting our sermons are simply endless, sometimes almost incredible. Nevertheless, no invention of the most inveterate story-teller could equal the facts which are matters of weekly experience.