Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.  Come down a little later.  Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years B.C.—­Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the other.

Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools, reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.

The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their clergyman,—­a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical processes as Babbage’s calculating machine.  The commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.  A man’s logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth; and people have sense enough to find it out in the long run; they know what “logic” is worth.

In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.  “Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions,” he says, “and God will smile thro’ the loins of those that rise up against them. I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord’s Day from his Flock, employ’d an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto ’em.  This Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his Text he took these Words, ’Despise not Prophecyings’; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy