The African woman on her solitary farm may have no inherent power for grasping large wholes, or seeing behind small externals to the moving cause beyond; yet when she sits all the morning sewing in her still front-room, while the children play out in the sunshine by the kraal wall and the flies buzz round, and she sees wherever she raises her head, through the open door, twenty miles of unbroken silent veld with the line of the blue mountains meeting the sky, she is exposed to eight hours of an educative influence entirely distinct from that she would have undergone had she sat in a tenement-room in a city court, and heard her neighbours tramp to and fro on the stairs, and the omnibuses crash in the street, and seen only from her window, when she looked out, the red-brick wall opposite. No man, be he hunter, traveller, or trader, or who or what he may, who has ever been exposed to both orders of influences, will say that their educative effect is the same, or that a man can remain long exposed to either set of influences, the artificial life of cities or the solitude of the desert, without being profoundly modified by it, above all, as to his view of existence as a whole, which is religion. The Boer, however blind by nature he may individually be, has always open before him the book from which the bibles were transcribed--and it has been impossible for him to fail wholly to decipher something from it. Therefore, even his dogmatic theology (and it is wonderful how very little real dogmatic theology the true primitive up-country Boer has!) lives, animated by a great, direct perception of certain facts in life. That which the Essenes sought in their rocky caves, which the Buddhist thinker to-day immures himself on his solitary mountain peak to find, which the Christian monks built their monasteries and cloisters to acquire; to supply men artificially with the means of partially attaining to which dim-aisled churches and pillared temples have been reared in the midst of dense populations; which the old Dissenting divine was feeling after when he said: "Spend two hours a day alone in your room with the window open if possible, in quiet and thought; your day will be the stronger and the fuller for it"; and which the Protestant hymn aims at when in its quaint doggerel it says-- "Night is the time to pray; The Saviour oft withdrew To desert mountains far away; So will his followers do. Steal from the world to haunts untrod, To hold communion there with God."