INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
697 
answered, “As for the gate that you talk of, all the world 
knows that it is a great way off our country. I cannot think 
that any men in all our parts do so much as know the way 
to it; nor need they matter whether they do so or no, since ire 
have, as you see, a fine, pleasant, green lame that comes down from 
our country the nearest ivay .” 
Now, as we all well know, neither the two inhabitants of 
the land of Vain-glory—Formalist and Hypocrisy—nor Igno¬ 
rance attained the object at which they aimed. They were 
fated to remain in outer darkness. When Formalist and 
Hypocrisy came to the foot of the hill Difficulty , “ they saw 
the hill was steep and high/’ and that the narrow way lay 
right up it; but there were two other paths, one leading to 
the right and the other to the left, at the bottom of the hill, 
and the two pseudo-pilgrims, supposing that these two ways 
might meet again on the other side, “were resolved to go 
into those ways.” “ So the one took the way which is called 
Danger, which led him into a great wood, and the other took 
directly up the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide 
held, full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell, and 
rose no more.” Ignorance, having entered the narrow way 
beyond the hill Difficulty, pursued his journey jauntily, puffed 
up in his own conceit, until he arrived at the very portals of 
Light; but when he sought to enter, he was bound hand and 
foot, and led away into darkness. 
Never forget the trite but golden proverb, that “a short 
cut is oft the longest way.” “ Compendia, dispendia,” the Latins 
were accustomed to say; and Dean Trench has admirabty 
observed, in his little work “On the Lessons in Proverbs”:— 
“ I cannot but think that for as many as are seeking diligently 
to improve their time and opportunities of knowledge, with 
at the same time little of either which they can call their own, 
a very useful hint and warning against an error which lies 
very near is contained in the little Latin proverb just cited. 
Not, indeed, for them only, but for all, and in numberless 
respects, it often proves true that a short cut may be a very 
long way home. Yet the proverb can never be applied better 
than to those little catechisms of science, those skeleton out¬ 
lines of history, those epitomes of all useful information, 
those thousand delusive short cuts to the attainment of that 
knowledge which can, indeed, only be acquired by those who 
travel on the king’s highway, on the old and, as I must call 
it, the royal road of patience, of perseverance, and of toil. 
Surely these compendia , so meagre and so hungry, with little 
food for the intellect, with less for the affections, we may 
style with the fullest right dispendia, wasteful, as they gene- 
