United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
How ready to stifle challenges of conscience, or any common motion of the Spirit, which tendeth to alarm their soul? How great enemies are they to such ordinances as serve to awaken sleeping consciences? And how do they hate such ministers as preach such doctrine as may serve to rouse them up, and set them a-work about their own salvation?
I pass by here the relation of how at every one of his meals he supped up the milk of four thousand and six hundred cows, and how, to make him a skillet to boil his milk in, there were set a-work all the braziers of Somure in Anjou, of Villedieu in Normandy, and of Bramont in Lorraine.
It is something. The warring nations war on. The world is in arms still. The rude instincts are not stayed in their intent. They pause, it may be; 'but a roused passion sets them new a-work. The speckled demons, that the degenerate angelic nature breeds, put on the new livery, and go abroad in it rejoicing.
This subtle adversary is now setting some a-work, to cry up, by preaching, speaking, and printing, a way to heaven which is not Christ; a kind of morality, civility, and outward holiness, whereupon the soul is to rest.
So that something preserves me, Something, Someone: and for what? ... If I had slept in the cabin, I must most certainly have perished: for lying there on the poop, I dreamed a dream which once I had dreamed on the ice, far, far yonder in the forgotten hyperborean North: that I was in an Arabian paradise, a Garden of Peaches; and I had a very long vision of it, for I walked among the trees, and picked the fruit, and pressed the blossoms to my nostrils with breathless inhalations of love: till a horrible sickness woke me: and when I opened my eyes, the night was black, the moon gone down, everything wet with dew, the sky arrayed with most glorious stars like a thronged bazaar of tiaraed rajahs and begums with spangled trains, and all the air fragrant with that mortal scent; and high and wide uplifted before me stretching from the northern to the southern limit a row of eight or nine inflamed smokes, as from the chimneys of some Cyclopean foundry a-work all night, most solemn, most great and dreadful in the solemn night: eight or nine, I should say, or it might be seven, or it might be ten, for I did not count them; and from those craters puffed up gusts of encrimsoned material, here a gust and there a gust, with tinselled fumes that convolved upon themselves, and sparks and flashes, all veiled in a garish haze of light: for the foundry worked, though languidly; and upon a rocky land four miles ahead, which no chart had ever marked, the Speranza drove straight with the current of the phosphorus sea.
"`Mend it'!" repeated Rose. "Nay! the Lord mend you, and give you repentance, if it be His will. And now, if you think it good, begin at the feet, and burn to the head also. For he that set you a-work shall pay you your wages one day, I warrant you."
Then shall England see a new thing, for whereas hitherto men have lived on the land and by it, the land shall no longer need them, but many sheep and a few shepherds shall make wool grow to be sold for money to the Easterlings, and that money shall the lords pouch: for, look you, they shall set the lawyers a-work and the strong hand moreover, and the land they shall take to themselves and their sheep; and except for these lords of land few shall be the free men that shall hold a rood of land whom the word of their lord may not turn adrift straightway."
Said Face-of-god: 'Wise art thou now, foster-father, but thou shalt be wiser yet in this matter by then a month hath worn: and to-morrow shalt thou know enough to set thine hands a-work.
"Then let it wait," decided the Mistress for this was Juana's official title. "Alvena, set the child a-work, and watch that she goeth rightly thereabout. Sybil, sue thou me." The departure of Juana and Sybil, for which Maude was privately rather sorry, set Alvena's tongue again at liberty.
As he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi . That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while from Felice church opposite came the clear voice of the cloistered ones, Chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights,
Word Of The Day