I Was Once Reproved By A Minister Who Was Driving A Poor Beast To
Some Meeting-House Horse-Sheds Among
The hills of New Hampshire,
because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath,
instead of
A church, when I would have gone farther than he to
hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I
was "breaking the Lord's fourth commandment," and proceeded to
enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen
him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He
really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men
who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that
it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The
country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a
village, the church, not only really but from association, is the
ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which
human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly,
such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the
landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting
than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the
Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale
of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the
day. You fancy him to have taken off his coat, as when men are
about to do hot and dirty work.
If I should ask the minister of Middlesex to let me speak in his
pulpit on a Sunday, he would object, because I do not _pray_ as
he does, or because I am not _ordained_. What under the sun are
these things?
Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that
which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches.
The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine. The
church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of
quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken
into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailor's Sung
Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting
outside in sunny weather. Let not the apprehension that he may
one day have to occupy a ward therein, discourage the cheerful
labors of the able-souled man. While he remembers the sick in
their extremities, let him not look thither as to his goal. One
is sick at heart of this pagoda worship. It is like the beating
of gongs in a Hindoo subterranean temple. In dark places and
dungeons the preacher's words might perhaps strike root and grow,
but not in broad daylight in any part of the world that I know.
The sound of the Sabbath bell far away, now breaking on these
shores, does not awaken pleasing associations, but melancholy and
sombre ones rather. One involuntarily rests on his oar, to humor
his unusually meditative mood. It is as the sound of many
catechisms and religious books twanging a canting peal round the
earth, seeming to issue from some Egyptian temple and echo along
the shore of the Nile, right opposite to Pharaoh's palace and
Moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and
alligators basking in the sun.
Everywhere "good men" sound a retreat, and the word has gone
forth to fall back on innocence. Fall forward rather on to
whatever there is there. Christianity only hopes. It has hung
its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange
land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the
morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child,
but, thank Heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's
shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience.
Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was
too hard for her to learn.
It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to
be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge
the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it
better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a
sad mistake. In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip
the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and
"He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of
what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most
part offensive to the nostrils. He should know better than
expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are
quite healed. There is more religion in men's science than there
is science in their religion. Let us make haste to the report of
the committee on swine.
A man's real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his
creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This
it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely
as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a
straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet
anchor does not drag.
In most men's religion, the ligature, which should be its
umbilical cord connecting them with divinity, is rather like that
thread which the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when
they went abroad from the temple of Minerva, the other end being
attached to the statue of the goddess. But frequently, as in
their case, the thread breaks, being stretched, and they are left
without an asylum.
"A good and pious man reclined his head on the bosom of
contemplation, and was absorbed in the ocean of a revery. At
the instant when he awaked from his vision, one of his friends,
by way of pleasantry, said, What rare gift have you brought us
from that garden, where you have been recreating?
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