"Night is the time to pray; The Saviour oft withdrew To desert mountains far away; So will his followers do. Steal from the world to haunts untrod, To hold communion there with God."
--that which religious minds in all centuries and of all races have sought after, has been strangely forced on the African Boer by his silent solitary life amid vast man-unmodified aspects of nature. And with all that he may lack in other directions of knowledge and wisdom, of keenness and versatility, that which the conditions of his life had to teach him, he has learnt. Therefore, though his dogmatic theology is in no sense higher or different from that of others, his religion oftentimes lives when theirs is dead.
We are aware, it may be said, that all this is purely a misconception; that the man of unusual intellect seeks nature and solitude merely that his own large mental powers may unfold themselves unhindered; that what the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet find, they take with them; that to the mere bucolic mind the midnight sky studded with stars is but the covering of the plain where sheep feed; and that the most infinite sky over him when he off-saddles alone at midday in a vast plain is but that to which he looks up in order to find the time. But this is not so. The great analytical reasoner may find, labouring in his laboratory, the great thinker in his study, watching the processes of his own mind, may discover, that which the vast man-untouched processes of nature testify of; it is exactly on the simple purely receptive mind that the silence and solitude of vast unmodified natural surroundings have the most educative effect.
Driving on a hot summer's day in a cart across a great African plain, with the light pouring down on the brak bushes and karroo, till it seemed to shimmer out of them, the Boer who drove us was, as usual, silent. He was a man six feet in height, large-boned and powerful, with a still blue eye, an iron will, and indomitable persistency. Living in a remote part of the country, he seldom went to church more than once in the year, and could with great difficulty read a chapter in the Bible. During the years we had known him we had never heard him refer to anything more profound than his sheep and cattle, and the habits of tiger-leopards, upon which he was an authority. After driving about two hours, the horses' feet sinking into the sand and coming out again with a sucking sound, but no movement breaking the hot stillness, he looked round at us, with that peculiar shy glance which marks men who live much alone, and do not often try mentally to approach their fellow-men, and said slowly in the Taal: "There is something I have long wanted to ask you. You are learned. When you are alone in the veld like this, and the sun shines so on the bushes, does it ever seem to you that something speaks? It is not anything you hear with the ear, but it is as though you grew so small, so _small_, and the other so great. Then the little things at the house seem all nothing. Do you hear it, too--you who are so learned?"