Clergymen-Dreadful Assurances-Terrifying Words-Too Late-Books of Punishments-The Cross-Agony-The Holy Office-The Question-Wordsworth-Suggestions- A Glad Philosophy - Coleridge-A Death-Bed-The Miserere and Gloria Patri. MONGST one hundred thousand clergymen, there of course must be many of exquisitely bad taste, for the capacity of acquiring knowledge up to a certain point, so as to be ordained, or even take the B.A. degree, is not, never was, and never will be, the same as that of original thought and just appreciation. From these men of bad taste we have very many sermons, and they being really the body of the priesthood, we get the too prevalent and too often gloomy view of Christianity which lies about us. It happened that on an Easter Sunday, when the Greek Church was so ecstatic that its devout members ran about the streets saluting each other with a holy kiss, and shouting out 'Christ is risen!' 'Christ is risen!' we heard a good man proclaim the glad tidings, with the melancholy assurance that we were all desperate sinners, and that about nineteen-twentieths of us would be burnt to all eternity. He did not even reassure us, as did an American pastor his hearers, with the opinion, that after 'being burnt to a crisp ' we should feel no more but drop into a painless and quiet annihilation. How calmly he droned out this desperate and most awful news, and how quietly the village congregation listened to it; how we all knelt at the benediction, and how the ladies hurried out of church, and compared notes on their bonnets; and how the farmers in smock-frocks, and the farmers who were gentlemen, walked quietly home, talking about the crops, the April weather, steam as compared with horse ploughing, deep headlands, and improved drainage, my readers can imagine. It was plain that the parson (and, for truth's sake, we must add that he is a good, kindly, hardworking old scholar, who periodically knocks himself up in trudging from door to door of his wide parish trying to do good,) had flown quite over their heads. Either they did not understand his sermon, or did not believe in the fate in store for them, or they quietly assured themselves that they all were of the number of the elect; for they, to all appearance, were as peaceful and at rest as their fathers who slept beneath the little grass-grown heaps outside the hill-church. Perhaps they did not quite comprehend what the parson said, and only accepted his messagedivine, as did Tennyson's Northern Farmer when he said An' I hallus comed to's choorch afoor moy Sally wur deäd, An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaäy loike a buzzard-clock ower my yeäd, An' I niver knaw'd what a meän'd, but I thowt a 'ad summut to saäy, An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awaäy. In that extraordinary picture from the life, you see the old man never really understood what the parson, who was buzzing away like a cockchafer over his head, preached about; but anxious that others besides himself should do their duty, he went to hear the parson do his; and then, having thought that he said what he ought to have said,' he (the farmer) 'comed awaäy:' there are a great many people whose belief is much like that of the farmer. 6 If, instead of a country church, we go to a country chapel, the result will be the same, or it may be something worse. We shall find incapable men, as too often we find in many churches, unable to attract their flocks, seeking power by terrifying them, just as we see grooms who cannot manage a horse, trying to conquer it by continued beating. One distinguished preacher, of whom, in other matters, we must speak highly, took occasion to |