the First. The pope, being informed of his imprisonment, wrote in a peremptory manner to the king, to insist upon the immediate release of his beloved son. Upon which his majesty sent to his holiness the bishop's whole set of armour, with this satirical answer, "See now if this be thy son's coat or not." A modern curate in a domino, or with his hunting whip and cap, is almost as little in character, as the bishop in his suit of armour. A well-directed and intelligent mind is thoroughly aware how much the system of this world depends upon rules, decorums, and forms: it is by these that all the beggary of life is covered, and a skreen is placed before the nakedness of our minds. These remain in the habits, even when the essence of virtue is departed from the principles, and keep even the vicious in a certain awe of each other; they supply the place of reason, to the simple and uninstructed, and will sometimes bind stronger than the laws of one's country, or the dictates of conscience. When I observe, therefore, a manly, spirited, and well-informed person, whose mind is in itself above the necessity of them, thus condescending, for the sake of example, to the little forms and usages of society, I regard this conduct as an unequivocal mark of greatness of soul, inasmuch as it discovers a disdain of those diminutive triumphs, those facile victories, which are gained from such petty contests. It may be true, that set forms and observances are not equally necessary to all; but if the ignorant and uninstructed discover, by the cheapness and neglect in which they are held by wise men, that they were designed only as helps to their own incapacity, and as corroborations of their own weakness, the pride of our nature will dictate an opposition in the persons to whom they lend a very essential support. There were some mathematicians, says Selden, who could, with one stroke of their pen, describe a circle, and, with the next touch, point out the centre. Is it therefore reasonable to banish all use of the compasses? Set forms are a pair of compasses. Those who are occupied about their daily concerns, or to whom their situations have denied them all the advantages of culture and intellectual exercise, will necessarily judge confusedly of distant objects; they will necessarily, in the consideration of them, seize upon those parts which come most within the sphere of their senses and observation, and upon the testimony they offer, conclude in regard to the whole. Thus ordinary men contemplate religion in its professors; they appreciate its worth, by the operation of it upon their lives; they see its order, its beauty, and its harmony, in the decency, the dignity, and the consistency of their pastors; and raise their thoughts to the conception of its internal excellence, on the testimony of those external marks with which it is accompanied. But those indecorums and irregularities which, in the daily conduct of a clergyman, are such stains and blemishes in his character, are downright deformities in his official capacity. When he is not content with degrading his profession by his ordinary manner of comporting himself, but must even introduce his coxcombries, affectations, and eccentricities into the high service in which he is engaged in the pulpit, the friends of religion have only to mourn over his folly and wickedness, while the scoffers grow more bold in their ridicule and loud in their exclamations, insult the feeble and confound the irresolute, by casting in their teeth the depravity of their teachers. It has always appeared to me, that human arro gance and insolence has then reached its farthest limit, when a clergyman, in his pulpit in the house of his God-in the actual exercise of his ministry, where an overwhelming sense of his own littleness, in respect to the sacred service about which he is occupied, ought, methinks, to bow down his heart of flesh to the dust, and prostrate every selfish thought within him, looks only to his present elevation above his audience, and discovers plainly, by his gestures and grimaces, that he is solely taken up with a pragmatical conceit of his own consequence, and forgets his Maker's glory in the mistaken pursuit of his own. What bosom does not swell with indignation, to behold a clerical fop, whose week has been passed in the stye of Epicurus, or consigned to the meanest amusements, and most barren occupations, suddenly start up in his pulpit in all the pride of office, and all the plenitude of pudding sleeves, blown out like a bladder with pursy conceit, unable to subdue the effervescence of his folly, or restrain his obstreperous ignorance within any bounds of decency, and tearing unmercifully to rags and tatters one of Tillotson's best sermons, with the fury of his mock zeal, and the unsparing vengeance of his emphatical blunders! I would, with all my soul, that the manes of those reverend gentlemen, who have done honour to their profession, by so many wise and profitable sermons, might rest in peace; but if any thing, methinks, could disturb their shades, it must be the galling necessity of beholding their meaning so miserably murdered in some of their most laboured and finished performances. It is thus that spendthrift heirs throw away their ancestorial property, and make ducks and drakes of that gold, which, in wise and charitable hands, might answer a thousand useful purposes. I think we want some legal restriction, by which such valuable relics might be preserved from the rude touch of the vulgar and profane; and these clerical Goths should no more be admitted to such a repository, than a blind bullock into a glass manufactory. But there are many other classes of abuse through which the church is wounded in its dignity and its interests, by the ignorance and affectation of its professors. Sometimes the mischief is done by turbulent and tempestuous folly; sometimes by smooth and adulating ignorance. Religion has its petits-maîtres, as well as its swaggerers. Thus it is regarded by the mass of its votaries, under different aspects, according to the character of the minister who sets it forth; for, at present, such is the rage for fine preaching, that, in the contemplation of the greater part of sermon-fanciers, their devotion is fastened upon the pulpit, or pinned to the sleeve of the minister. Religion undergoes a kind of personification in their imaginations, that depends upon the complexion of the teacher. It has sometimes a red face and a fiery deportment; sometimes a sleek countenance and a white hand; and sometimes a saturnine pomposity of aspect, that can afford to dispense with knowledge and with wit. It would be pleasant to observe, could we draw pleasure from a ridicule which touches the concerns of religion, the various methods adopted by those ministers, who " give not God the glory," to play upon the doting imbecility of their auditors. I have known the heart of an elderly lady taken captive by a clergyman's manner of walking to his pulpit; another has fallen a victim to his method of muking himself up; another has held out till the cambric handkerchief has begun its operations; and some are proof against every thing but the coup de main, or slapping-to of the book after the second lesson. My curate distinguished himself, upon his first arrival in my parish, by a most irresistible roll in his reading: he would begin with a simple motion of his lips, which at length rose to such a solemn mutter, as announces a thunder-clap; and presently such an uproar would succeed, as threatened to dispart the earth and discover the realms of Pluto. The discipline of our club, however, and particularly the chastisement of the Echo, has sobered down his tones to so reasonable a pitch, that ladies in any state may venture to be present, and the parish is no longer in pain for the foundations of the church. He retains only, now, a sort of whining recitative, a kind of opera tone, which I understand is in high esteem in the metropolis; where, I am told, it has been in contemplation to invite over a certain number of Italian youths, to be educated for eveninglecturers. It is my plan in general to preach comfortable and cheerful doctrines to my congregation; not that I spare them either, when I see grounds for severity and reprehension. But I find that the minister of the next parish has drawn off a part of my audience by the very winning manner of his denouncing them to perdition he tosses about his damns with such a grace (as Addison says Virgil, in his Georgics, did his dung), that his church is crowded with voluntary victims, who repair to this sacred executioner, to be launched into a dreadful eternity, with as much cheerfulness as to a christening. : Indeed it is a sad truth, that the church has of late years been considered, both by the preacher and his congregation, as a place rather of amusement than instruction, as a kind of show or spectacle, where we |