The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

350 Reconciliation

Jutland and " Waitee "

I made a mistake in The Authoress of the Odyssey [in a
note on p. 31] when I said " Scheria means Jutland—a piece
of land jutting out into the sea." Jutland means the Land of
the Jutes.

And I made a mistake in Alps and Sanctuaries [Chap. Ill],
speaking of the peasants in the Val Leventina knowing
English, when I said " One English word has become uni-
versally adopted by the Ticinesi themselves. They say
'Waitee1 just as we should say 'Wait' to stop some one
from going away. It is abhorrent to them to end a word with a
consonant so they have added ' ee/ but there can be no doubt
about the origin of the word." The Avvocato Negri of
Casale-Monferrato says that they have a word in their dialetto
which, if ever written, would appear as "vuaitee," it means
" stop " or " look here/* and is used to attract attention.
This, or something like it, no doubt is what they really say
and has no more to do with waiting than Jutland has to do
with jutting.

The Parables

The people do not act reasonably in a single instance. The
sower was a bad sower ; the shepherd who left his ninety and
nine sheep in the wilderness was a foolish shepherd; the
husbandman who would not have his corn weeded was no
farmer—and so on. None of them go nearly on all fours,
they halt so much as to have neither literary nor moral value
to any but slipshod thinkers.

Granted, but are we not all slipshod thinkers ?

The Irreligion of Orthodoxy

We do not fall foul of Christians for their religion, but for
what we hold to be their want of religion—for the low views
they take of God and of his glory, and for the unworthiness
with which they try to serve him.

Society and Christianity

The burden of society is really a very light one. She does
not require us to believe the Christian religion, she has very