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No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are six of them talking and listening all at the same time. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him.
Scientific education is rapidly destroying credulity in old superstitions yet current among the unlettered, and especially among the peasantry as, for instance, faith in mamori and ofuda. The outward forms of Buddhism its images, its relics, its commoner practices affect the average student very little.
Some other travellers have been more inquisitive; unlettered sojourners among the wilder peoples have shared their superstitions, and consulted their oracles, while one or two of the old Jesuit missionaries were close and puzzled observers of their 'mediumship'.
The instructions given me by Boris Stürmer were absolute and precise. The reason that I was always at the charlatan's right hand was because he could only write with difficulty, and was therefore unable to make any memoranda. His letters were the painful efforts of an unlettered mujik, as indeed he was. And yet already he had become the most renowned man in the Russian capital!
Nay, there have been those, undoubtedly, who have known God falsely with the intellect, yet felt Him truly with the heart, and there be many, principally among the unlettered little ones of Christ's flock, who positively know that much that is dogmatically propounded to them of their Redeemer is cold, barren, unsatisfying, and utterly false, who yet can give no account of their certainties better than that of the inspired fisherman, "We know Him, and have seen Him."
At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age.
The same schoolmaster uses seven synonyms in describing the "fashion" of speech of the ignorant constable, "undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, rather unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." When we remember that it was really Shakespeare who wrote this, we know that he had been led to study variety of expression.
But amongst the poor and unlettered do we find the light working; and in them are our chiefest allies, our most earnest disciples."
It cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity.
For example, he saw faults in Mozart and Beethoven where there are only beauties, and beauties which even an ignorant listener if he is naturally musical will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and Pascal, the inventor of a new syntax.
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