Excerpt from Dorothy Forster: A Novel
Those who are so happy as to be born and to live out their appointed time in the North Country are not only removed from the luxuries and vices of London, but also from that wicked modern fashion of scoffing at the things which lie beyond man's comprehension, and should therefore be accounted sacred. We of Northumberland certainly do not pretend disbelief in what is sufficiently proved but cannot be understood. Almost everybody (every woman, indeed, without exception) has seen, some time or other, strange and wonderful things which cannot be explained. Some, it is true, have endeavoured to reason these things away by pretending the insensible and brute action of chance (among them, Mr. Hilyard tells me, a great Latin poet, named Lucretius), which is incredible unless we allow the round world and all that is therein to have been itself constructed and set a-going by accident. Others, still living, attribute the stories which abound among us to foolish credulity and ignorant superstition; unto such persons there is no answer but the evidence of things related and testified. Others again, whose opinion is to be received with respect, think they perceive in them the workings of man's Chief Enemy. Let me, however, for my own part, following the expressed opinion of Mr. Hilyard and what I believe to have been that of my lord the late bishop, continue to think that what is permitted, though it be not understood must be received with reverence and without too close scrutiny, as doubtless intended for no other purpose than a merciful one, videlicet, the admonition of the guilty and the encouragement of the virtuous.
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