Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

94 KING ALFRED.
to say poisonous, dishes now laid before a reading
public. Beading was then much what deciphering
manuscripts in an unknown tongue would be now-a-
days,-exclusively the occupation of the learned,
so that when King Alfred set the fashion of translating
a Latin book -into Saxon, he was founding a
new world, which was the vulgarisation of ideas by
means of popular language. He was deeply conscious
of his own deficiencies in book learning, but
he made his very ignorance profitable to his people
r
by calling about him scholarly men, who could raise
the tone of his court, and look upon the king as their
chief scholar. Royal in his spirit, whatever the
shortcomings of his mind may have been, he vowed
to God one half of his time and one half of his sub-
stance, and then devised a way in that uncouth and
clockless age of measuring the time which he had
given. This he did by burning wax candles of a
certain weight. His end, be it observed, was the
value of time, not economy. The first view of England
as a maritime power also dates from King
Alfred. He directed special attention to the fleet,
and is said likewise to have conceived something
very akin to what we now understand by conscription
in ordering his subjects to serve a term as fighting-men
and afterwards as husbandmen. These
arts and devices are only a development in its larger
sense of education, for the moral training of his
people was the object the king had in view when
late in his life's day he sat down to book learning.