Josh Billings, “it’s a fair even-going critter,” capable of being either pulled down or made bigger.  That is about the length and breadth of the matter, and if we had to appeal to the commonwealth as to the correctness of our position it would be found that the “ayes have it.”  We don’t believe in the Parish Church; but a good deal of people do, and why shouldn’t they have their way in a small fight as well as the rest of folk?  All, except Mormons and Fenians, who honestly believe in anything, are entitled to respect.

Our Parish Church has a good contour, and many of its exterior architectural details are well conceived and arranged; but, like other buildings of the same order, it has got a multiplicity of strange hobgoblin figure-heads about it which serve no purpose either earthly or heavenly, and which are understood by hardly one out of five million.  We could never yet make it out why those grotesque pieces of masonry—­gargoyles, we believe, they are called--were fixed to any place of worship.  Around our Parish Church and half-way up the steeple, there are, at almost every angle and prominence, rudely carved monstrosities, conspicuous for nothing but their ineffable and heathenish ugliness.  Huge eyes, great mouths, immense tooth, savage faces and distorted bodies are their prime characteristics.  The man who invented this species of ecclesiastical decoration must have been either mad or in “the horrors.”  An evenly balanced mind could never have thought of them, and why they should he specially tacked to churches is a mystery in accordance with neither King Solomon nor Cocker.  The graveyard of our Parish Church is, we dare say, something which very few people think of.  We have seen many such places in our time; but that in connection with our Parish Church is about the grimmest specimen in the lot.  It has a barren, cold, dingy, unconsecrated look with it; and why it should have we can’t tell.  Either ruffianism or neglect must at some time have done a good stroke of business in it; for many of the gravestones are cracked in two; some are nearly broken to pieces; and a considerable number of those in the principal parts of the yard are being gradually worn out.  We see no fun, for instance, in “paving” the entrances to the church with gravestones.  Somebody must, at some time, have paid a considerable amount of money in getting the gravestones of their relatives smoothed and lettered; and it could never have been intended that they should be flattened down, close as tile work, for a promiscuous multitude of people to walk over and efface.  The back of the churchyard is in a very weary, delapidated and melancholy state.  Why can’t a few shrubs and flowers be planted in it?  Why is not the ground trimmed up and made decent?  From the time when the Egyptians worshipped cats and onions down to the present hour, religious folk have paid some special attention to their grave spaces, and we want to see the custom kept up.  Our Parish Church