- You Hypocrite, Come Out Of That,
Live Your Life, Do Your Work, Then Take Your Hat.
I Have No Patience Towards
Such Conscientious Cowards.
Give Me Simple Laboring Folk,
Who Love Their Work,
Whose Virtue Is A Song
To Cheer God Along.
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.
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