From this form of ignorance and superstition our primitive Boer is saved, assuredly not because of any superior wisdom and insight inherent in him, but by the conditions of his life. For the average human creature reads life as it is continually presented to him. The Boer has not willed to go into the wilderness and the desert to seek for wisdom with the teacher of Galilee or the sage of India; but for the two hundred years of his South African wandering that which prophet, seer, and poet have in all ages turned to for wisdom has been laid open as a book before him, whether he willed it or not; so that he too, however slow or dull his individual intelligence, has been compelled by the daily conditions of his life, with more or less clearness, to decipher it. Dark and blinded beyond the average of human souls must have been the old fore-trekker, who, as at sundown his wagon crept for the first time into some vast plain where no white man's foot had ever trod, and as the blue shades of evening fell across the countless herds of antelope, and the far-off flat-topped mountains stood sharp against the sky, could cry "I, _I_ am the centre of this life! The earth is mine, and the fulness thereof!" And the solitary African youth who has been out in the veld looking for his father's sheep all day, over kopjes and through dried-up watercourses, and who walks home in the starlight, and hears the jackals call, and pauses, listening silently to hear if it be not the young lions crying for their food, has been exposed to educative influences totally distinct from those which he would have been subjected to had he spent the day in a factory amid pulleys and wheels and a crowd of labourers, and had walked home at night through a gas-lit crowded street, past bars, music-halls, and policemen, to his garret. The last music-hall air, the picture of light streaming through the public-house doors, the whirr of the machinery, and a thousand minute complex sense-impressions springing immediately from the action of man, the one, of necessity, carries home with him. The other has none of these complex man-related sense-impressions; he loses much which the other wins, but he also has something of his own. Whether he will or no, however dull his ear and dim his eye and torpid his intellect, he carries home with him pictures of the colossal things which he has seen, things which the son of Jesse beheld when in his youth he tended his father's flocks at night, to guard them from the wolf and the bear, and which, when King of Israel, he reproduced in that chant which has gone down the ages: "When I behold the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained--what is man that Thou art mindful of him!"