The Story of a Tinder-box

Excerpt

LECTURE I.

My Young Friends,—Some months ago the Directors of this Institution honoured me with a request that I should deliver a course of Christmas Juvenile Lectures. I must admit I did my best to shirk the task, feeling that the duty would be better intrusted to one who had fewer demands upon his time. It was under the genial influence of a bright summer's afternoon, when one thought Christmas-tide such a long way off that it might never come, that I consented to undertake this course of lectures. No sooner had I done so than I was pressed to name a subject. Now it is a very difficult thing to choose a subject, and especially a subject for a course of juvenile lectures; and I will take you thus much into my confidence by telling you that I selected the subject upon which I am to speak to you, long before I had a notion what I could make of it, or indeed whether I could make anything at all of it. I mention these details to ask you and our elders who honour us—you and me—with their company at these lectures, for some little indulgence, if at times the story I have to tell proves somewhat commonplace, something you may have heard before, a tale oft told. My sole desire is that these lectures should be true juvenile lectures.

Well, you all know what this is? [Holding up a box of matches.] It is a box of matches. And you know, moreover, what it is used for, and how to use it. I will take out one of the matches, rub it on the box, and "strike a light." You say that experiment is commonplace enough. Be it so. At any rate, I want you to recollect that phrase—"strike a light." It will occur again in our course of lectures. But, you must know, there was a time when people wanted fire, but had no matches wherewith to procure it. How did they obtain fire? The necessity for, and therefore the art of producing, fire is, I should suppose, as old as the world itself. Although it may be true that our very earliest ancestors relied for necessary food chiefly on an uncooked vegetable diet, nevertheless it is certain that very early in the history of the world people discovered that cooked meat (the venison that our souls love) was a thing not altogether to be despised. Certainly by the time of Tubal Cain, an early worker in metals, not only the methods of producing fire, but also the uses to which fire could be applied, must have been well understood. Imagine the astonishment of our ancestors when they first saw fire! Possibly, the first sight of this wonderful "element" vouchsafed to mortals was a burning mountain, or something of that kind. One is scarcely astonished that there should have been in those early times a number of people who were professed fire-worshippers. No wonder, I say, that fire should have been regarded with intense reverence. It constituted an essential part of early sacrificial worship. Some of my young friends, too, may remember how in ancient Rome there was a special order (called the order of the Vestal Virgins), whose duty it was to preserve the sacred fire, which if once extinguished, it was thought would bring ruin and destruction upon their city.