fighting on his side a great portion of the universe; perhaps the
whole; for as he who breaks one commandment of the law is guilty of
the whole, because he denies the fount of all law, so he who with his
whole soul keeps one commandment of it is likely to be in harmony
with the whole, because he testifies of the fount of all law.

I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a man of
like passions with ourselves; of one who had the most intense and
awful sense of the unseen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby; of
one who had hard struggles with a flesh and blood which made him at
times forget those laws, and failed mightily thereby; of one whom God
so loved that He caused each slightest sin, as with David, to bring
its own punishment with it, that while the flesh was delivered over
to Satan, the man himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of
one, finally, of whom nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a
thousand may say, 'I have done worse deeds than he: but I have never
done as good ones.'

In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South Devon, among
the white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows, and the red
fallows and red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as
beautiful as day, and christened Walter Raleigh. His father was a
gentleman of ancient blood: few older in the land: but,
impoverished, he had settled down upon the wreck of his estate, in
that poor farm-house. No record of him now remains; but he must have
been a man worth knowing and worth loving, or he would not have won
the wife he did. She was a Champernoun, proudest of Norman squires,
and could probably boast of having in her veins the blood of
Courtneys, Emperors of Byzant. She had been the wife of the famous
knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had borne