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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