- 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.
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