Mr. Anstey Guthrie has some pleasant instances of texts misapplied.  He was staying once in a Scotch country-house where, over his bed, hung an illuminated scroll with the inscription, “Occupy till I come,” which, as Mr. Guthrie justly observes, is an unusually extended invitation, even for Scottish notions of hospitality.  According to the same authority, the leading citizen of a seaside town erected some iron benches on the sea front, and, with the view of at once commemorating his own munificence and giving a profitable turn to the thoughts of the sitters, inscribed on the backs—­

THESE SEATS
WERE PRESENTED TO THIS TOWN OF SHINGLETON
BY
JOSEPH BUGGINS, ESQ.,
J.P.  FOR THE BOROUGH. 
“THE SEA IS HIS, AND HE MADE IT.”

Nothing is more deeply rooted in the mind of the average man than that certain well-known aphorisms of piety are to be found in the Bible—­possibly in that lost book the Second Epistle to the Ephesians, which Dickens must have had in his mind when he wrote in Dombey and Son of the First Epistle to that Church.  “In the midst of life we are in death” is a favourite quotation from this imaginary Scripture.  “His end was peace” holds its place on many a tomb in virtue of a similar belief.  “He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb” is, I believe, commonly attributed to Solomon; and a charming song which was popular in my youth declared that, though the loss of friends was sad, it would have been much sadder,

    “Had we ne’er heard that Scripture word,
        ‘Not lost, but gone before.’”

Mrs. Gamp, with some hazy recollections of the New Testament floating in her mind, invented the admirable aphorism that “Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for ’em to see out of a needle’s eye.”  And a lady of my acquaintance, soliloquizing on the afflictions of life and the serenity of her own temper, exclaimed, “How true it is what Solomon says, ’A contented spirit is like a perpetual dropping on a rainy day’!”

A Dissenting minister, winding up a week’s mission, is reported to have said, “And if any spark of grace has been kindled by these exercises, oh, we pray Thee, water that spark.”  A watered spark is good, but what of a harnessed volcano?  When that eminent Civil servant, Sir Hugh Owen, retired from the Local Government Board, a gentleman wrote to the Daily Chronicle in favour of “harnessing this by no means extinct volcano to the great task” of codifying the Poor Law.  An old peasant-woman in Buckinghamshire, extolling the merits of her favourite curate, said to the rector, “I do say that Mr. Woods is quite an angel in sheep’s clothing;” and Dr. Liddon told me of a Presbyterian minister who was called on at short notice to officiate at the parish church of Crathie in the presence of the Queen, and, transported by this tremendous experience, burst forth in rhetorical supplication—­“Grant that as she grows to be an old woman she may be made a new man; and that in all righteous causes she may go forth before her people like a he-goat on the mountains.”